Challenge

Since its founding in 1972, Rohan has created innovative outdoor clothing to ensure customers’ comfort and protection in the UK’s varied climate. Now, the retailer is focusing on an entirely new environment: the digital world. As online purchases increased from less than 30% to more than 50% of Rohan’s total sales in the past five years, the company knew it needed a modern digital storefront that would be easy to maintain.

“Creating and managing Rohan’s ecommerce platform in-house started to take a toll on developers’ time, and we found that we were developing features that other companies offer out of the box,” said Michael Gray, Rohan’s IT director.

The cracks in Rohan’s legacy system were especially apparent when sales traffic spiked from a few hundred daily orders to thousands during winter and summer sales. “I used to get nervous before a big sale because of the flaky payment provider supporting our ecommerce platform,” said Gray. “We occasionally had outages, and they could last anywhere from 10 minutes to 2 days. If you can’t process payments, you can’t make money.”

Rohan needed a payment solution that could keep up with its traffic demands year-round.

At the same time, Rohan struggled to use the clunky data reporting capabilities of its previous payment system. Fetching data for compliance reports was a hassle, and each time government regulations changed, Rohan needed to commission a team of developers to update its website to stay compliant.

Additionally, it was difficult for Rohan to find fraud-related data. When flagging transactions as fraud, its legacy payment provider didn’t provide any context around that data. So when legitimate customers called to inquire why their transaction was declined, there wasn’t much Rohan’s customer service team could do to help. “We had to look up data in multiple places and write extra functionality to handle potential fraud, and try to simplify things for the customer service team. This became a day-to-day annoyance,” said Gray.

Finally, Rohan struggled to offer new payment methods without consuming in-house resources. The company wanted the ability to easily launch new payment methods in order to meet changing customer preferences and drive conversion.

Solution

In 2022, Rohan decided to replace its legacy payment system with a modern solution. Rohan chose to build with BigCommerce, the Open SaaS ecommerce platform offering out-of-the-box functionality and versatile configuration capabilities for businesses to build their online storefronts.

Rohan outsourced the management of its digital storefront to BigCommerce in November 2022, and Rohan went live with its new ecommerce platform in just three months. Shortly after, the retailer integrated Stripe as its payment processor through BigCommerce. This included adopting Stripe Payments to solve the problems of reliability, data reporting, and limited payment methods associated with its legacy provider.

Through the Stripe Dashboard, Rohan gained the data reporting capabilities it had been missing. Rohan can now easily navigate important resources, monitor integrations, and access business insights. This, combined with BigCommerce, meant that Rohan could also easily report on and adjust for evolving compliance standards—without needing to dig for scattered data or commit as many engineering resources toward making updates.

Rohan also added Stripe Radar to detect and block fraud, providing its customer service team with clearer insights into fraud-related data when customers called about specific payments.

In addition, Rohan implemented Stripe’s optimized checkout suite, which includes the Payment Element (an embeddable UI component), multiple payment methods, and Link (an accelerated checkout experience). Rohan used these features to create a reliable custom checkout page and to quickly and securely add new payment options, including Apple Pay and Google Pay. With easy-to-use tools, Rohan’s developers can now more effectively manage an online storefront, deliver an improved customer experience, and drive conversion.

“Stripe provides a streamlined checkout experience that makes online shopping as simple as it should be: customers enter their details, they get the products, and we get the money,” said Gray. “There are no outages, no headaches in between each of these steps, no more issues to fix sucking up developers’ time.”

Results

In less than two days, Rohan integrated Stripe into its platform, reduced downtime, unlocked growth opportunities, and simplified fraud protection. “Documentation was straightforward, simple, and easy to read, making the Stripe integration seamless,” said Gray.

Achieving 0 downtime, even during busy shopping seasons

With more than 500 million API requests per day and daily capacity tests, Stripe is the only major payment processor to publish its uptime. Stripe’s API servers provide easy scale-up and minimal latency, enabling Rohan to accelerate and improve the customer experience on its website. Now, Rohan doesn’t have to worry about performance, reliability, or scalability during peak demand times.

Attracting 6.5% more customers with higher payment acceptance rates

Two months after going live with BigCommerce and Stripe, Rohan has seen a 6.5% increase in online customers. Gray attributes this to higher payment acceptance rates now that Stripe Radar helps Rohan detect fraud without blocking legitimate customers.

The integration with Radar has also improved Rohan’s ability to help customers understand their fraud-related inquiries. “The fraud information we receive from Stripe is much clearer than our previous provider,” Gray says. “It no longer requires a layer of translation to be interpreted by our customer service staff.”

Building a customizable checkout experience to quickly offer new payment methods

With the Payment Element, Rohan now has an adaptable checkout page that can be easily updated to include new fields and payment methods while the company curates its ideal checkout experience. Recently, Rohan enabled Apple Pay as an additional payment method for customers shopping online. With its previous legacy platform, the retailer had started writing code to enable this integration manually, but with the Payment Element, Rohan was able to activate Apple Pay by simply ticking a box.

“It’s a massive benefit to enable Apple Pay to our customers in seconds, considering 40% of our traffic currently comes from Apple devices,” said Gray. “As we add more interaction, functionality, and improve the visuals on our ecommerce platform, we rely on BigCommerce and Stripe to implement incremental improvements.”

Next, as Rohan looks toward expanding internationally, the company knows it can count on Stripe to handle payments in multiple currencies with a few clicks.

About our partner

BigCommerce’s Open SaaS solution empowers merchants to build, innovate, and grow their businesses online while selling more at every stage of growth. Learn more about our partnership with BigCommerce.