Challenge

Beyond Menu launched its first website in 2012 to bring online ordering to small, family-owned Asian restaurants. To serve the unique needs of its target audience, Beyond Menu charged lower commissions to help restaurants preserve their profit margins and provided high-touch services to help them grow their business, including education on marketing and operating strategies. Today, 85% of the restaurants Beyond Menu works with are immigrant-owned.

In 2023, Beyond Menu wanted to strengthen its restaurant-first approach by enhancing its online and app-based ordering platforms, and by creating additional services to help make restaurants discoverable online. To enable some of those changes, Beyond Menu needed to ensure its payment system would support its growing product roadmap. That meant switching to a new payments platform, but the company didn’t want the integration project to take up too much of their developers’ time.

“Payments are a large part of our business, but we’re not in the payments business,” said Rodney Cox, Beyond Menu’s chief technology officer. “Our real business is helping small restaurants succeed and win. We needed a payment solution with the right tools and technology to allow us to execute fast on our business roadmap.”

The ideal solution would be easy to implement yet still offer advanced capabilities to support the company’s business model, which relied on transaction fees. Top priorities included preserving the company’s existing checkout flow, accelerating payouts to restaurants, and simplifying the restaurant onboarding process. Looking ahead to the company’s growth plans, Beyond Menu also wanted flexibility to add new revenue streams, such as subscription fees, expand payment method offerings with options like WeChat Pay and Alipay, and get payments availability in Canada.

Solution

After reviewing several providers, Beyond Menu found that Stripe Connect would best support its technical needs and business goals. For Cox, the ease of working with Stripe technology made the decision clear. “I love good software,” he said. “And Stripe checks all the boxes.”

Connect’s developer-friendly APIs and detailed documentation made it simple to integrate the platform into Beyond Menu’s hybrid business model, which is both a marketplace and a platform for individual restaurant websites. To preserve its existing checkout flow and the look and feel of its website order pages, Beyond Menu chose Stripe Payment Element, an embeddable user interface that provides access to more than 40 payment methods. With the Payment Element, Beyond Menu also used Stripe’s dynamic payment methods to automatically configure the interface to show the payment methods the system currently accepts: credit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. The team used the same approach to add the Payment Element to the checkout pages on the custom websites it builds for its customers and to the marketplace mobile app.

Connect also streamlined Beyond Menu’s process for paying out to its restaurants. By creating a connected account for each restaurant, the solution ensures all payments flowing into Beyond Menu’s platform are assigned to the correct connected account and distributed to the restaurant’s primary bank account every week, with the option of adding daily payouts.

Along with these technical improvements, Connect provided a new method for onboarding restaurants. Beyond Menu selected Stripe-hosted onboarding, which offloaded compliance issues such as Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements to Stripe. “Having my engineers build a KYC flow into our onboarding process to collect documents and then put my support team on the job to follow up with thousands of restaurants would have been a very long, hard process,” said Cox. “The automated KYC function from Stripe makes it a very low-touch effort.”

After implementing Connect, Beyond Menu added another Stripe product, Billing, to develop a new SaaS-fee revenue model. Previously, Beyond Menu had only generated revenue from fees it collected on orders. Billing allowed the company to create a subscription tier for restaurants joining the platform. At the same time, Beyond Menu added Revenue Recognition, which creates a single, complete view of a company’s revenue, streamlines accrual accounting, and simplifies compliance through automation. Revenue Recognition gave Beyond Menu’s finance team visibility into its transaction and subscription revenues without requiring assistance from the engineering team.

Results

Connect transition completed in two months

The ease of implementation and use of Stripe-hosted onboarding allowed Beyond Menu to transition all of its order volume to Stripe in just two months—requiring the work of only one developer and one project manager.

That speedy transition allowed Beyond Menu’s developers to remain focused on creating new, value-add services. For example, the company refined its restaurant websites and made it easier for restaurants to upload photos of dishes, which doubles conversion rates. “If we had chosen another provider, we wouldn’t have been able to spend as much time building products that a restaurant would be proud of,” Cox said.

Beyond Menu’s developers also created a completely new mobile app for their restaurant marketplace, an online demand-generation service that helps restaurants get found online through search engine optimization and reviews, and new phone-ordering products that help restaurants during busy times and save on labor costs.

Easy roadmap for expanding payment options and geographic reach

With the Payment Element, Beyond Menu can now easily add payment offerings with no additional coding. The company has already conducted a trial of WeChat Pay and plans to expand that offering in the future. “The pilot was a breeze from an engineering standpoint,” said Sashank Tadepalli, Beyond Menu’s payments product lead.

The Connect integration also provides a path for Beyond Menu to manage currency and tax issues related to accepting payments in Canada, which the company is continuing to explore.

Faster payouts boost restaurants’ cash flow

Prior to implementing Stripe, Beyond Menu customers received payouts every two weeks. Because managing cash flow is especially important for small, family-owned restaurants, some Beyond Menu customers opted not to accept credit card payments on the platform. Instead, they required diners to pay on arrival in cash.

After implementing weekly payouts, and more recently upgrading to daily payouts, many of those restaurants are now accepting cards—and increasing their sales.

New subscription model supports lower transaction fees

The additional revenue generated by subscription fees, managed with Billing, is helping Beyond Menu continue to charge lower transaction fees to its restaurants—supporting the company’s goal to provide more value to smaller, family-owned restaurants.