Challenge

BASE FOOD develops and markets nutritionally complete food products* and is on a mission to “bring innovation to staple foods and simplify healthy eating.” Since launching in 2016, the company has experienced rapid growth and was listed on the Growth Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2022.

Today, more than 60% of its sales come from the company’s e-commerce website. Due to this, BASE FOOD has poured its energy into online marketing. To build on this momentum, the company decided to advance its revenue streams by revamping its e-commerce system in 2018. In order to scale its updated system, the company needed an optimal solution that would meet its payment requirements. It turned to Stripe Payments as the payments platform for its improved e-commerce site.

Solution

During the company’s early stages, Stripe features such as quick installation, easy-to-use dashboards, and scalability were important to BASE FOOD.

“At the time, the company had few employees and we weren’t able to dedicate resources to installing or managing a payments system, said Yosuke Yamamoto, BASE FOOD’s chief financial officer. “Stripe’s extensive documentation allowed for a quick installation, and the Dashboard lets us easily review our data. Additionally, Stripe was used by large, global companies who trusted it as a payments platform after significant growth. With this in mind, we decided that it was the optimal solution.”

As a business that purchases and inventories stock up front, BASE FOOD needed to be aware and sensitive of lengthy payment cycles.

“The payment service we previously used operated on a monthly cycle, so we were relieved to switch over to the weekly payment cycle offered by Stripe,” said Yamamoto. Switching to a weekly payment cycle contributed to improved cash flow.

Results

Since introducing Stripe Payments, BASE FOOD has seen significant improvements in its payment success rate.

“The payment system we used before would sometimes fail, forcing us to manually input the sale. Since switching to Stripe, the number of payment failures has decreased,” said Yamamoto. “Our products sometimes receive media coverage, leading to increases of traffic of up to forty times and increased orders; yet when this happens, Stripe’s system never fails.”

Stripe’s solutions have also reduced the number of manual hours spent on managing sales. With Stripe’s Dashboard, sales analysis that used to take BASE FOOD’s team an entire day can now be completed in half the time. Additionally, Stripe Radar allows the BASE FOOD team the ability to immediately address fraudulent transactions.

“Unauthorised credit card transactions and other issues can be reviewed on the Dashboard, allowing us to respond immediately. As we prepared to go public, we were evaluated on strict management of sales data, shipping data, and order data – making the use of reliable payment services like Stripe even more important,” said Yamamoto.

As the company plans to expand overseas in the future, it will rely on Stripe as an efficient and stable payments platform in order to support its growth.