Challenge

In 2012, Dodd Caldwell and Ryan Wood, the founders of MoonClerk, started searching for an online payments platform to serve as the foundation for their new business, MoonClerk. The team had a vision to simplify how small businesses accept and manage online payments, filling a large gap faced by lean businesses without in-house technical resources. Caldwell and Wood wanted a white-label solution, but couldn’t build a payments platform from scratch. Familiar platforms like WePay, which they had used in the past, lacked capabilities the founders saw as crucial, such as billing features, fraud capabilities, and global coverage. However, Caldwell and Wood didn’t have the bandwidth to cobble together a collection of separate solutions to fill the gaps where other platforms didn’t deliver.

“We’re a small team and can’t be dealing with disparate product systems,” said Caldwell, cofounder and CEO of MoonClerk. “Having strong, reliable products together on a single payments platform is vital to our growth and profitability.”

Solution

MoonClerk ultimately found Stripe to be the best partner to deliver on its vision to simplify online payments for small businesses. MoonClerk chose to leverage several of Stripe’s products to give small businesses a comprehensive payments platform that could be easily rolled out without a heavy technical lift:

• Payments provides global payment capabilities and flexible integration options for payment methods to unlock fast and easy expansion opportunities.
  
• Connect lets developers quickly build and scale payment experiences using easily-configurable APIs.
  
• Billing speeds customer billing with subscriptions and invoices that keep the revenue flowing.
  
• Invoicing enables global invoicing without code, to save time.
  
• Radar uses machine learning to prevent fraud while avoiding errant declines, all without any additional setup.
  

MoonClerk white-labeled its Stripe solution to achieve the look and features of bigger brands in the space, but without the exorbitant price or need for developers. On the back end, Stripe’s comprehensive documentation and ease-of-use allowed Wood, cofounder and CTO at MoonClerk, to quickly add new features and expand MoonClerk’s offering whenever Stripe rolled out new functionality.

“Stripe helps us keep overhead low. We don’t have to learn different systems, and reporting is easily consolidated,” said Wood.

Results

Fast-forward nearly a decade from where the team began and MoonClerk uses a half dozen Stripe products to let small businesses in more than 35 countries quickly and seamlessly create embeddable, linkable, and brandable payments services without any technical skills. With Payments, Connect, Billing, Invoicing, Radar, and other Stripe products supporting its growth, MoonClerk has built a unique solution to help small businesses better compete in today’s increasingly online world.

Payment optimizations reduced customer churn by over 30%

When recurring payment transactions fail, companies like MoonClerk lose significant revenue. Rather than asking customers to manually update information on saved cards that have expired or been replaced, Stripe’s direct connection with card networks allows for seamless updating of cards without a frustrating service interruption, avoiding customer churn and lost revenue.

“We focus on churn more than customer growth because churn is notoriously high with small businesses,” Caldwell said. “Stripe’s authorization optimization features, such as smart retries and Adaptive Acceptance, have helped us reduce churn by over 30%.”

Fast expansion to more than 35 countries

Even the smallest businesses served by MoonClerk recognize the opportunities of a global online marketplace. Stripe’s broad international availability, with payments processing across 135+ global currencies, clears the path for MoonClerk to safely and confidently expand at any pace, including into emerging markets like Brazil and India.

“Wherever Stripe works, we work,” said Caldwell. “As Stripe adds new countries, we’re able to expand to those countries all while maintaining proactive fraud control, authorization optimizations, and more.”

A single-yet-comprehensive payments platform for efficient scalability

With just Stripe, MoonClerk gets access to all the tools needed to enable its customers to accept payments online and around the world. MoonClerk can focus on business growth and expansion, while Stripe provides the payments platform to accept payments, reduce fraud, manage subscriptions, and more, all with little technical effort.

“Stripe is the one platform that lets us focus on growing and scaling MoonClerk,” added Dodd.