Challenge

Nikkei ID provides a single point of entry to a range of content. Members can subscribe to publications and television content—like Nikkei Channel Markets and Nikkei xTECH—and sign up for events and seminars on topics related to career planning, personal finance, and professional education.

But the registration process was burdensome. It required prospective users to input a lot of information and only accepted credit card payments, resulting in high abandonment rates, even among people with a strong interest in joining.

Solution

Nikkei decided to simplify the experience by offering Apple Pay. And rather than modify its existing billing engine at significant engineering cost, it implemented the new payment method by adopting Stripe.

"Stripe always had a large presence in the engineering community and I personally had a strong interest in the company. Stripe's service is highly scalable and will allow us to offer flexible billing plans," said Masao Saga, deputy manager at Platform Business Office of Nikkei.

Results

Nikkei integrated with Stripe Payments and Stripe Billing in six months. The process was much faster, and resulted in a more comprehensive suite of payment options and pricing models, than anything offered by other payments processors. Now, Nikkei has a payments infrastructure that can adapt to its future needs.

With Stripe Billing, Nikkei can now offer complex customizations like free trials and use revenue recovery features to provide grace periods for payment failures. It has gained in other ways, too: The intuitive visualization of the Stripe dashboard improves the overall user experience and saves Nikkei from having to build a separate administrative system for customer service.