Challenge

As an ecommerce platform that strives to help digital creators maximize their revenue, SamCart considers payments part of its core business strategy. In 2021, the company built an in-house payments team and developed a roadmap of features to help creators grow their businesses.

Chief among the company’s goals was the ability to offer more payment methods to match the company’s increasingly global customer footprint. SamCart also needed a payment service provider that would allow it to build its own payment offering into the platform, helping creators easily manage transactions and offer a smooth checkout experience with flexible payment options.

“Most consumers today interact with fintech and digital financial products on a daily basis. This means expectations for digital, connected, and mobile-friendly experiences are higher than ever,” says Justin Smith, CEO of SamCart. “As an ecommerce platform for creators, we recognized the need to bridge our industry-leading ecommerce checkout experiences with financial products, and are investing heavily in this.”

Solution

As a long-time user of Stripe’s payment solutions for its internal financial systems, SamCart chose to expand with Stripe because of its reliability and global scale for money movement.

“As SamCart continues to grow globally, we know we have a partner in Stripe that can scale with us and ensure our customers can use our platform seamlessly, to process payments wherever their customers are,” says David Rapoport, vice president of operations and payments at SamCart.

SamCart used Stripe Connect to easily integrate payments into its creator marketplace. With Stripe Billing, the team streamlined management of subscriptions and reporting processes for both its internal teams and customers. The company also used Stripe Radar to offer built-in automated fraud-protection capabilities.

In 2022, the company implemented Stripe’s optimized checkout suite, including the Payment Element—a secure, embeddable UI component that enables creators to offer their customers’ preferred payment methods, including local payment methods and buy now, pay later methods. It also automatically displays the payment methods most likely to convert based on location, local currency, and more, helping creators expand into new markets and improve the checkout experience. SamCart also adopted Link, Stripe’s one-click checkout solution, which securely saves and autofills customers’ payment details. Together, these new capabilities help boost revenue and average order value by offering more payment flexibility for customers.

SamCart ultimately used the optimized checkout suite to launch its own unified payment solution, SamPay. SamPay is built directly into SamCart as the platform’s default payment offering, helping creators earn more revenue globally.

Results

Accelerated development time and more efficient teams

Other payment providers that SamCart considered expected SamPay’s development and migration to take up to a year, with many unknowns throughout that process. SamCart was able to launch SamPay with minimal disruption to its customers and only light engineering work for its internal team. Within the first 30 days of launching SamPay, SamCart seamlessly moved over 10% of its total platform gross merchandise value, with zero unexpected customer churn.

Additionally, SamCart’s engineers used to spend 6–8 weeks updating the system every time they wanted to add a new payment method. Now, with the Payment Element and the support of the Stripe professional services team, SamCart can deploy new payment methods in under one week. With Stripe’s user-friendly APIs and Radar’s built-in risk management, SamCart has also saved money on at least three full-time employees.

“Stripe helped teach our engineers the intricacies of the Stripe APIs and helped us find shortcuts to get SamPay into market faster than if we had tried to do it ourselves,” Rapoport says. “Our team now has the knowledge to support and build on their own.”

99% of new customers choose SamPay as their preferred payment processor

SamPay is a core part of SamCart’s ecommerce engine for the creator economy. Since its launch, SamPay has become SamCart’s default payment processor, with 99% of new customers selecting SamPay during onboarding. SamCart is in the process of rolling out SamPay and its new features to all customers, helping them access new revenue streams around the world and maximize conversions.

“We are thrilled to take this next step in our journey and offer more payment capabilities to our customers very quickly,” Rapoport says. “We have exciting things on the roadmap that will continue to leverage the Stripe ecosystem to give us the speed and efficiency we need to create value for our customers.”

40% higher conversion and 60% higher average order value, with buy now, pay later

With the Payment Element, SamCart added buy now, pay later payment methods in one third of the time it would have otherwise required. Buy now, pay later methods Affirm, Afterpay, and Klarna have been particularly valuable for creators. Creators who used these payment methods in the beta saw up to a 40% increase in order conversion and a 60% increase in average order value.