Challenge

As a technology-forward company, Wiley – a global leader in research and education – had spent decades building a series of interconnected tech stacks that powered each of its digital product suites. Over time, these separate tech stacks created a fractured customer experience across its products and this increased friction during checkout for customers. When Brendan Gualdoni, head of digital commerce platforms at Wiley, began to explore new business strategies, he uncovered more than $200K of revenue in abandoned online carts due to an antiquated purchasing experience.

Wiley offers a wide range of physical and digital products and services, across many regions and currencies. Because of this complexity, using its legacy payment solution would have required too many resources to consolidate all of Wiley’s domains into a single checkout process. “The existing strategy had a one-size-fits-all solution,” says Gualdoni. “We needed to move from monolithic applications to platforms with headless products driven by APIs. This would allow us to adopt a composable architecture and provide flexible capabilities for the customer journey.”

Wiley looked for a turnkey payment solution that could maintain its distinctive branding and consolidate its thousands of domains and dozens of products and services under a single, full-stack payment provider. This is when it found Stripe.

Solution

As Wiley began to replace a series of legacy payment solutions by uniting them with Stripe, the organization also brought on Stripe Enterprise Support for additional expertise in working through the deployment process. Stripe Payments would serve as the foundation for Wiley Payment Services, but Wiley wanted to do more than replace its old payment process one-to-one. Wiley designed a scalable payments solution that would allow the company to maintain a straightforward customer experience as it grew.

The Wiley and Stripe teams implemented Stripe Checkout and Stripe Elements to create a more consistent global brand and a simpler, more secure payment experience. Now, Wiley can create consistent, customisable, branded checkout pages for new regions with new domains as the company continues to grow. This new flexibility includes built-in currency conversion, so the company can more quickly expand into new markets. And with Elements, Wiley can use prebuilt UI components, so the team can test pages to further improve conversions and reduce cart abandonment rates.

These checkout improvements have also helped Wiley simplify the purchasing process for in-person book sales. Wiley now uses Stripe Terminal at events, such as university pop-up book sales, which gives customers a single, cohesive purchasing experience.

Wiley also adopted Stripe Radar to simplify fraud monitoring. With its previous payment providers, Wiley had to integrate new fraud solutions each time it created a new website domain, which was a hurdle for the company’s international growth. Since Radar didn’t require additional integration time, the company was able to launch quickly and maintain focus on other areas of the business.

Results

>5,000 domains filtering through Wiley’s payments stack

By replacing its broad but inflexible legacy-tech payment stacks with Stripe, Wiley has consolidated its more than 5,000 domains into a single payment provider.

Its legacy solutions limited how Wiley products could be bundled in checkout carts, because carts were separate for different product suites. Now, customers can mix, match, and bundle any of Wiley’s products and services through a unified checkout experience. This consolidation also includes offline sales. Since Terminal connects Wiley’s inventory and checkout system, customers can also fill a cart online for a particular book sale and check out in person.

180+ countries supported by Wiley’s online stores

With Checkout and Elements, Wiley can more effectively expand into new geographies. Automated currency conversion has helped the company reach more than 180 countries, including Canada, Australia, and the UK, and that number is growing. “Because we are a global company, we have merchants of record in all of the countries we do business in,” explains Gualdoni. “We would have to integrate into each application directly, continuing to build and support one-off solutions. This gets complicated really quickly.”

Customizability generating new revenue streams

The flexibility of Stripe Payments helped Gualdoni develop a proof of concept for a new e-reader subscription-as-a-service model using viax, in just six weeks. “We integrated the model with Stripe to showcase a demo to key stakeholders,” says Gualdoni. “Stripe handled the heavy lifting – like fraud and card tokenisation – and the documentation and UI were phenomenal.”

Wiley’s partnership with Stripe made such an impression that Gualdoni now manages requests from other departments to implement Stripe. An initiative is underway to bring Stripe into other marketplaces in the business to help get its research, education, and talent resources in the hands of more professionals and students around the world.