Challenge

In order to offer expandable payment solutions to its customers, the SamCart team needed to solve three core problems:

1. Offer more global payment methods to match the company’s increasingly global customer footprint and desire for more payment-method options.
   
2. Build additional features (such as fraud protection, card account updater, and taxes) into SamCart’s payment solutions, to increase the value for customers and help them grow their businesses without having to become payment experts.
   
3. Use a payment processor that provides flexible, user-friendly checkout experiences to meet customers’ growing expectations for online purchases.
   

“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 e-commerce platform for creators, we recognised the need to bridge our industry-leading e-commerce checkout experiences with financial products, and are investing heavily in this.”

Solution

Since 2021, SamCart has made payments part of its core business strategy, building an in-house payment team and developing a roadmap of features to help customers grow their businesses. Using Stripe Connect and Radar, SamCart easily integrated payments into its creator marketplace with automated fraud-protection capabilities. With Stripe Billing, the team streamlined management of subscriptions and reporting processes for both its internal teams and customers. In 2022, the company launched SamPay, a unified payment solution built with Stripe’s universal Payment Element, which allows digital creators to accept payment methods from around the globe with a secure, embeddable UI component.

With features such as instant payouts, BNPL, local payment methods, and more, SamPay helps boost revenue and average order value for creators by allowing their customers to purchase when, where, and how they want. Integrating the universal Payment Element into the SamCart solution enables SamCart to easily deploy new global payment methods that Stripe continues to add, helping creators stay on the cutting edge of serving their international customer base.

Results

Accelerated development time and more efficient teams

Other payment providers that SamCart considered expected SamPay’s development and migration to take 6–12 months, with many unknowns throughout that process. As an existing Stripe customer, SamCart was able to launch SamPay – using the Payment Element – 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 – not including the time it took to maintain existing payment-method connections. Now, with the Payment Element and the support of Stripe Professional Services, the team can write code once, then customise and deploy it to new payment methods in under one week. With Stripe’s user-friendly APIs and Radar’s built-in risk management, SamCart has also saved on hiring 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,” says David Rapoport, vice president of operations and payments at SamCart. “Our team now has the knowledge to support and build on their own.”

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

Recently out of beta mode, SamPay’s BNPL capabilities help drive value for creators; customers who use these features see up to a 40% increase in order conversion and a 60% increase in average order value. SamCart also added three more BNPL providers to its Payment Element implementation in just one month. Without the Payment Element, this process previously would have taken over three months and multiple API integrations to complete.

Before 2023, the only payment method SamCart accepted on Stripe was credit card transactions. This year, the platform will offer at least six different payment methods through Stripe, and the list is growing. Stripe can now automatically recommend the most preferred payment method for customers in a specific geography. This will allow SamCart’s customers to expand globally and provide the payment methods their buyers prefer to use, ultimately increasing their sales and boosting customer satisfaction.

“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 Rapoport.

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

SamPay is a core part of SamCart’s e-commerce engine for digital product sellers and the creator economy. Since 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 unlock new revenue streams around the world and maximise conversions.

“We are thrilled to take this next step in our journey and offer more payment capabilities to our customers very quickly,” says Rapoport. “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.”