Stripe Newsroom: Castlery accepts in-person and online payments with Stripe, expands to the US

Castlery is a direct-to-consumer furniture retailer founded on the basic concept that furniture should be built to last, look well, and be reasonably priced. Castlery began selling their products online in Singapore in 2013, and rapidly expanded into offline retail with real showrooms. They recently joined with Stripe’s unified platform to manage their in-store and ecommerce payments in one place, as handling both online and offline payments previously complicated.

They have now expanded their business into the United States after successfully establishing a strong market position in Singapore since inception and a good online retail presence in Australia over the last two years.

Switching to Stripe to accept in-store payments in Singapore

In Singapore, in-store transactions necessitated manual entry of purchase information into Castlery’s internal systems. Castlery switched to Stripe Terminal to remove this bother, which automatically transfers in-store payment details into Castlery’s systems. Stripe’s developer support and account deployment teams collaborated extensively with Castlery in a shared Slack channel during the integration process, which took less than a month. “With Stripe, it’s a frictionless procedure — customers simply touch their card in-store, and our systems are quickly updated,” says Zhiwei Zhou, co-founder and CTO.

Stripe Terminal simplifies refunds and reconciliation with a unified view of the customer

Refunds for in-store transactions were a cause of frustration for Castlery customers prior to the integration of Stripe Terminal. Castlery “had to collect a customer’s bank account and make a transfer through the banking system,” according to Zhiwei, “a process that may take up to two weeks and cause clients grief.” With Stripe, the refund process is now only a few days long, there is rapid notice, and Castlery no longer needs to collect any further information from clients.

Castlery has a single image of the consumer that is valuable to the operations teams because they use Stripe to take online and in-store payments. If a consumer makes an online purchase and then returns to the store to complete the transaction, Castlery has a complete picture of their activity and can adapt their customer experience accordingly. This also aids the reconciliation procedure for the finance team. Rather than printing out accounts from numerous providers for off-line and online payments, and spending hours following down different codes and transactions, all transaction data is conveniently accessible in the Stripe Dashboard.

Expansion to the US and protection from fraud with Stripe Radar

Castlery has expanded to the United States after integrating Stripe in Singapore and Australia. Castlery was aware of several fraud practices in the US market, therefore Stripe Radar was used to activate a fraud detection engine. They worked with Stripe to establish new standards, such as requiring 3D-secure 2 for high-risk transactions and putting some transactions through a risk assessment procedure.

Castlery plans to further increase its market share in Australia’s furniture retail sector, as well as continue their growth and expansion in the United States, with Stripe aiding its payment processes.