Challenge

Founded in Spain, Playtomic is the world's largest community for racquet sports enthusiasts. The platform not only facilitates court bookings for sports like Padel, but also acts as a social network where players can connect, organize matches, and join events.

Playtomic began as a software platform that coordinated facilities management for clubs. As it evolved into a marketplace model, it needed a way to handle transactions between players and clubs. Playtomic handled payouts to clubs manually, which took a long time and sometimes caused errors, such as duplicate transfers. The platform wanted a system where players could pay for bookings, transfer payouts to the clubs, and retain a commission.

As Playtomic set its sights on international expansion, it also faced the challenge of facilitating global payments. It needed a system that could handle multiple currencies and diverse payment methods, so customers around the world could pay with their preferred payment method. “Our main priority is to make the marketplace the most powerful tool for clubs and players, where clubs won't need to do any of the recurring tasks they are doing today,” said Pedro Clavería, cofounder and chief strategy officer at Playtomic.

With all these issues to address and big plans for the future, Playtomic was looking for a simple payment solution that would help the platform grow.

Solution

While considering different payment service providers, Playtomic felt that Stripe stood out for its clear documentation that was tailored to early startups, making integration easy.

With Stripe Connect, Playtomic is able to automate payments and easily onboard new users. Players pay for their bookings, and the funds are directly routed to the respective clubs, with Playtomic automatically taking its commission. This streamlines Playtomic's operations and reduces errors, ensuring a more efficient and reliable payment system.

Playtomic's business model includes a SaaS component where clubs are billed for using its technology. Using Stripe Billing, Playtomic manages these recurring payments, handling recalls and chargebacks when necessary. Additionally, Playtomic has introduced a feature allowing clubs to manage their own recurring payments from players.

As it grew into a global company, Playtomic found Stripe Payments useful for handling transactions in local currencies, eliminating currency conversion hassles and costs. It offers users a consistent payment experience regardless of their location. “It's about facilitating all players worldwide. Stripe makes it so simple for clubs to take payments from these international players,” said Clavería.

Results

With Stripe's help, Playtomic has streamlined its payment processes and grown its user base.

Over one million active users managed monthly

With Stripe, Playtomic created a unified payment system that supported its growth and expansion. Using Connect and Billing, Playtomic gained a payment system robust enough to manage more than one million active users every month. This streamlined its operations while also reducing onboarding time, allowing the platform to focus on user experience.

Since implementing Stripe, Playtomic has seen a significant amount of transactions, processing up to €14.5 million in a single month, and achieved authorization rates of 99%.

“Stripe's efficiency and reliability have been instrumental in our growth,” said Clavería.

Clavería is also impressed with the number of users who save their credit card details on the platform, because those who do this are more likely to become recurring users. This indicates the trust and convenience that users associate with the payment system Stripe supports for Playtomic.

Expansion to 5,000 clubs across 52 countries

Going global was a significant step for Playtomic, and Stripe played an important role in fueling its expansion. Connect helped Playtomic reduce its payout time by 75%, enabling clubs outside of Europe to receive payment.

With Stripe, Playtomic has successfully expanded its operations, and now works with 5,000 clubs located in 52 countries. Reflecting on this global growth, Clavería said, “Our ambition was to be everywhere, and with Stripe, we've made significant strides in that direction. Handling payments in so many countries could have been a nightmare, but Stripe made it feel like a walk in the park.”