Challenge

GAIA is poised to capture much of the home goods market in Mexico’s fast-growing e-commerce channel. However, its previous payments platform left GAIA open to increasing fraud and falling conversion rates. Worse yet, it took GAIA days to determine the cause when customer payments were denied. With different gateways for credit cards and digital payments, the company’s view of its payments process was clouded.

“We need to know our users better than ever to give them more convenience, understand their customer journey, and anticipate their needs,” said Ana Montoya, head of UX at GAIA. “But as our conversion rates suffered, we didn’t have the visibility to understand or control the causes of friction in our payments processes.”

GAIA wanted more control over how its payments data was presented and available for analysis so it could improve its roughly 80% payments acceptance rate. A combination of fraud and fraud false positives caused declining authorisation rates and added unnecessary friction to the customer experience, which threatened revenue. GAIA also wanted to consolidate gateways while offering additional payment options, such as the locally preferred meses sin intereses (MSI), which is similar to buy now, pay later methods where customers pay in instalments over time.

Solution

GAIA chose Stripe Payments to consolidate its payments platforms, gain deep visibility into the customer experience, and deliver a seamless payment experience for its fast-growing customer base. GAIA also added Stripe Radar to further fight fraud using algorithms that quickly adapt to shifting global fraud patterns without blocking payments from legitimate customers. GAIA was able to quickly test and launch their integration of Stripe using the Stripe Connector for Adobe Commerce.

Key to GAIA’s goal to increase conversion rates is Stripe Adaptive Acceptance. It enables GAIA to automatically manage payment declines due to insufficient funds, inaccurate card information, and suspected fraud. Adaptive Acceptance uses machine learning to selectively retry declined payments in real time, even before a response is returned to the customer, and automatically update saved information when the issuing bank replaces a card.

“Stripe provides full visibility into all our payments and much-needed transparency around risk and fraud,” said Montoya. “Stripe also gives us more control over our backend payments processes so we can identify and reduce payments friction, improve our conversion rates with features like Adaptive Acceptance, and more easily reach our revenue targets.”

Results

By combining Stripe Payments and Radar, GAIA benefited from a payments platform that unlocked more payment visibility and additional fraud protection, ultimately leading to higher authorisation rates without adding friction to the customer experience.

9% increase in conversion rates

The native Stripe Connector for Adobe Commerce and frictionless customer experience helped GAIA quickly replace its previous payments platform and gain significant increases in conversion rates.

Montoya said, “We couldn’t get above 80% authorisation rates with our previous platform. With Stripe, we quickly hit 89% and expect to surpass 90% soon because Stripe Adaptive Acceptance helps ensure successful payments that would have otherwise been declined.”

Decrease in fraud and false positives

Stripe Radar detects and blocks fraud so GAIA can find ways to adjust processes and further combat fraud without adding more friction for customers. When necessary, GAIA also uses Stripe-supported 3D Secure chargeback protection to trigger additional verification steps on selected transactions.

Montoya said, “We love having a more proactive problem-solving process with Stripe so we can experiment on increasing conversion rates without inviting more fraud. Stripe’s automatic fraud protections also give our customer service reps more time to focus on customers instead of fraud prevention.”

Frictionless customer experience

With Stripe’s intuitive payments platform, GAIA can devote more resources to improving the overall customer experience and removing friction from its checkout process. Plus, the flexibility and reliability of Stripe gives GAIA a more flexible and manageable payments infrastructure.

Montoya added, “Our revenue targets are in reach because Stripe gives us checkouts stability for higher conversion rates. Our customers see a checkout that just works, without friction, and with a GAIA experience they love.”