Challenge

Mixtiles founders David Katz and Eytan Levit had seen how smartphones and social media were making it easy to share great-looking photos digitally. With a few clicks, users can create beautiful online galleries of their best photos. Yet achieving similar results with physical photos remained an intimidating prospect: printing and framing photographs was slow and expensive, and hanging them was difficult and could potentially damage walls.

In 2016, the two saw an opportunity to create Mixtiles—an online service that makes it easy and affordable for users to fill their walls with high-quality photographs, bringing the convenience of the smartphone age to home decor. “We identified every step in the process: cropping, printing, framing, and hanging. We decided to make every step 100 times easier for customers,” said Yuval Shwager, head of product at Mixtiles.

The success of Mixtiles depended on both a great product and an efficient, reliable, and cost-effective technology infrastructure that facilitated an effortless digital customer experience. That made choosing the right payment provider to process customer orders a key element. The company needed payment technology that could serve a global customer base and provide developer-friendly tools to integrate with the company’s backend. And because Mixtiles planned to continue optimizing and expanding its services, it wanted a partner that shared a similarly innovative approach—one that would offer flexible technology and a commitment to continuous improvement and features upgrades.

“We are all about innovating,” said Shwager. “So we needed a partner we could grow with in the future.”

Solution

To launch the company in 2016, Mixtiles chose to partner with Stripe based on its reputation among the startup community. “The tech startups here rely on Stripe to quickly set up solutions,” said Shwager. “Having a one-stop shop for several different functions is a big benefit for us.”

Mixtiles used Stripe Atlas to incorporate the company in Delaware and receive an IRS tax identification number. After that, the company adopted Stripe Payments to process its online transactions. Stripe Payments had the global reach Mixtiles needed, and Stripe’s APIs made it easy to integrate Payments into the Mixtiles custom user interface and checkout page.

As the company grew to serve millions of customers with eight facilities around the world, Mixtiles leaders particularly appreciated the hands-on approach of their Stripe account managers. “They really know us and meet with us regularly, answering our questions and helping us adopt new features,” said Shwager.

One of those conversations introduced Mixtiles to Stripe’s Optimized Checkout Suite, which includes prebuilt payment UIs optimized for conversion, dynamic payment methods, and Link—Stripe’s accelerated checkout. Over the course of a year, Mixtiles adopted the suite, including the Payment Element and Link, which reduces friction during checkout by auto-filling payment details for customers who save their information. Using the Payment Element and dynamic payment methods, Mixtiles was able to add 16 local payment methods with a single integration. Mixtiles could rely on Stripe to dynamically surface the most relevant eligible payment methods for each transaction, based on customer device, location, local currency, and more.

Later, Mixtiles was interested in enabling buy now, pay later (BNPL) payment methods in response to customer demand. To determine the impact that BNPLs could have on its business, Mixtiles used the Optimized Checkout Suite’s A/B testing tool, which uses dynamic payment methods to run an experiment. Using A/B testing, Mixtiles was able to easily set up an experiment in the Dashboard with no code that offered BNPL options to half of its customers. The result: a 4.1% uplift in revenue. The promising results gave the company the confidence to enable Affirm, Klarna, and Afterpay (known as Clearpay in the UK). Since then, Mixtiles has launched A/B tests to experiment with newer payment methods including Cash App Pay and Amazon Pay.

Mixtiles also relies on Stripe Radar for built-in fraud protection. Fraud prevention was an important consideration in choosing a payments provider, and something Mixtiles felt they couldn’t go without. “For the product engineering team, it was important to have a tool that is easy to implement and work with,” said Shwager. “Once it’s there, Radar just does what it needs to do.” They also appreciated that Radar was built in to Stripe Payments and did not require any additional code to implement. “The main benefit for us is having a partner and a one stop shop for all these things together,” Shwager said.

Results

Order volume increases 583%

Since implementing Stripe Payments, Mixtiles has seen its order volume grow by 583%, with approximately 12 million orders in 2023.

BNPLs lead to revenue uplift of 4.1%

Enabling BNPL options through the Optimized Checkout Suite led to net new sales, increasing revenue. “We saw our revenue grow by 4.1% with buy now, pay later options,” said Shwager. “Stripe’s payment method A/B testing feature is a low-risk, high-reward tool to accelerate our revenue growth. It’s incredibly straightforward to run experiments, no code needed.”

Link accounts for 17% of credit card transactions

Since enabling Link, Mixtiles has seen 17% of all credit card transactions check out with Link, and AOV for Link transactions has been 5% higher than for non-Link transactions. Link has already gained traction with Mixtiles customers, and the company is confident it will continue to grow.

“With the scale Stripe has, we knew that Link would reach more and more customers in the future, so we were happy to be an early adopter and reinforce for our customers that we were innovative,” said Shwager.