Challenge

Kent McCraigg founded OrderMyGear in 2008 to help his father, a longtime sporting goods distributor, manage the stacks of paper order forms coming from the local high school teams he outfitted. The company he created allows business owners to open their own online storefronts and digitize the order and payment process. OMG grew to serve three distinct but related niches: team dealers like McCraigg’s dad, promotional product distributors, and apparel decorators including screen printers and custom embroidering shops. In 2011, OMG partnered with Stripe for payment processing and soon accepted its first online payment.

Since then, OMG has changed and expanded considerably, as has the ecommerce landscape. To stay competitive, OMG needed to continually strengthen its payment capabilities—a key part of its promise that its customers will have a simple, smooth experience with online sales of company swag, corporate gifts, employee uniforms, team uniforms, and equipment. To do so, OMG kept a close eye on its Stripe payment experience, looking for additional ways to improve checkout for shoppers ordering from an OMG storefront. Recently, the company’s focus has been on adding new payment methods to increase conversion and payment tools to help consumers afford purchases more easily.

“Over the past few years, we have prioritized modernizing our storefronts to reflect the experience consumers expect when shopping online,” said Lauren Zimmermann, senior product marketing manager at OMG. “It’s important that the online shopping experience is as retail-like as possible, from the branding of our stores to the checkout flow and payment experience.”

Solution

Stripe has helped the company navigate changing consumer expectations over the years. OMG initially adopted Stripe Payments for payment processing, then added Stripe Connect to handle customer onboarding and payouts, Stripe Tax to understand OMG’s liability for the payments made to its customers, Stripe Radar for fraud prevention, and Stripe Sigma for business insights and reporting.

OMG also turned to Stripe to create a smooth checkout flow with a wide variety of simple, flexible payment options. In early 2024, the company adopted Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, which includes Stripe Elements, a set of embeddable payment UIs that improve the checkout flow and drive conversion. OMG used the Payment Element to add payment methods through a single integration, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH Direct Debits, and Klarna. OMG also adopted Link, Stripe’s accelerated checkout, which securely saves and autofills consumers’ payment details for a quicker transaction.

Results

Connect enables fast, reliable onboarding for new customers

Connect is “core” to OMG’s business, according to Jarron Sharp, OMG’s director of product management. The company relies on Connect Onboarding for frictionless identity verification for new customers. “It’s pretty low effort for our customers, which means they’re off and running and getting paid very quickly,” said Sharp.

Simple, automated reporting and reconciliation yield efficiency gains

OMG relies heavily on the insights it gains from analyzing payments data with Sigma. The company has set up a series of automated reports that flow to its payments engineering team, controller, and finance department for both mundane tasks like dispute resolution and complex jobs like end-of-year reconciliation and budget audits. “Three of our teams are completely dependent on the reporting coming out of Sigma,” said Sharp.

8% decrease in abandoned cart rate after implementing Optimized Checkout Suite

The Optimized Checkout Suite enabled OMG to integrate a simple, intuitive checkout flow and roll out new payment methods. Removing friction from the checkout process proved a big hit with consumers, with OMG’s abandoned cart rate dropping 8% following the upgrade.

67% increase in average order value for orders using Klarna and 50% of transaction volume driven by Link

Klarna pays OMG in full, upfront, while giving customers the option to pay over time. As a result, OMG customers are seeing a 67% increase in the amount consumers are willing to purchase in each order—and the number is still climbing. “Our customers can’t get enough of it,” said Zimmermann. “They serve a lot of parents, whose kids may need a player bundle in order to participate in their sports season. Klarna makes those mandatory purchases significantly more budget-friendly.”

Link’s quick, easy checkout experience has also been a big hit with shoppers visiting OMG storefronts. Nearly 50% of all of OMG’s transaction volume is processed using Link.

Stripe solutions support OMG’s future growth

OMG’s strong partnership with Stripe means OMG can focus on the particular needs of each of its user segments, knowing that Stripe will take care of payment technology and innovation. “Stripe is much better at taking payments than we would be if we tried to build it ourselves,” said Sharp. “They’re creating and innovating, and then we get to bring these products to our customers—who are psyched with us for doing that.”