Challenge

Founded in 1992, TeamSport is a data-driven company working to bring premium experiences to people of all ages and abilities across the UK and continental Europe, 90% of whom now book their visits online. In February 2022, the UK-based company began expanding into other countries, starting with Germany, followed by the Netherlands in 2023. However, the company needed separate integrations for different providers active in different regions – no single platform could offer a consistent user experience across multiple regions. Dealing with multiple third-party providers posed real challenges for reconciliation and the daily management of accounts, not to mention juggling multiple relationships and dealing with outages. The company also struggled to meet customers' preferences for additional payment methods, such as PayPal and iDeal, without separate integrations.

As the company expanded, the complexities of its multivendor strategy grew even more arduous. The team struggled to properly integrate or support online and in-person payments in the new locations in Europe, even as its legacy provider was unable to update its checkout experience quickly enough to keep up with the evolving domestic locations. As a result, it became difficult for TeamSport to launch new locations and to integrate its payment data into one coherent financial picture at a critical time in the company's growth.

What's more, different regions had different levels of fraud risk, particularly when it came to the company's voucher program (essentially e-gift cards). Bad actors were buying vouchers with stolen credit card information and reselling them to unsuspecting consumers, who were then unable to redeem the vouchers. Ultimately, TeamSport needed a partner that could help it grow, giving its development team the ability to build and test new features as needed while gaining the analytics necessary to make informed decisions.

Solution

TeamSport was interested in Stripe's ability to replace the complexity of its multivendor issues with a unified commerce experience that could support multiple geographies and payment methods, as well as Stripe's experience partnering with similar private equity-backed companies. Before making the switch to a new payment provider, however, TeamSport wanted to ensure that doing so would improve conversion rates meaningfully. "We are a very data-driven organisation, and if you want to get something done, you'd better come with the data to justify it," said Russell Martin, head of sales projects at TeamSport.

The company's POS provider, BMI Leisure, already had a basic integration with Stripe, allowing Russell and his team to enable Stripe in various locations at the click of a button. During September 2024, the team collected data for 10 UK-based locations using Stripe and compared that to data from 10 other UK locations using their legacy provider. Next, they switched treatments to control for differences among locations and collected another month's worth of data.

Enthusiastic about the test data, and with positive developer feedback on Stripe's support documentation and ease of integration, TeamSport implemented Stripe Payments for payment processing in late November 2024. To deliver a frictionless checkout experience, TeamSport added Stripe's Optimised Checkout Suite, which combines pre-built UIs, dynamic payment methods, and Link, a wallet built by Stripe. The company used the Payment Element to turn on payment methods including Apple Pay, PayPal, and iDEAL, ensuring TeamSport could meet the needs of customers in the Netherlands and Germany. Going forward, the company can easily turn on popular payment methods wherever it expands.

To drive its unified commerce experience forward, TeamSport adopted Stripe Terminal, which consolidates data from online and in-person payments, producing a unified customer view. The move replaced a complex and divided picture of the company's financial data with a single stream that led to simplicity and uniformity across its locations. Russell and his team preconfigured 155 Stripe Reader S700 devices and their POS system on a site-by-site basis, then deployed them across the company's 43 locations, with some locations receiving as many as 20 card readers. Some sites utilised a custom built Android app for standalone operations where alternative POS providers are used and integration is not available.

TeamSport also implemented Stripe Radar, which uses AI to detect and block fraudulent transactions while letting legitimate payments go through. The company needed to tackle the fraud issues with its voucher program, particularly in the UK. More customers there typically use credit and debit cards, which are prone to higher rates of fraud. With Radar for Fraud Teams, TeamSport could develop custom rules to tailor its fraud responses in different regions based on their unique risks, as well as have access to data from Radar about what payment attempts were blocked and why.

Results

Conversion rate increases 2.6%–4.7% through Stripe Payments

After a two-month testing period, TeamSport saw a 2.6%–4.7% uplift in progression rate with Stripe compared to its legacy providers – more than enough to justify the switch to Stripe. The primary driver of this improvement was the reduction in the number of fields in the checkout journey for customers to populate, which directly contributed to the observed uplift. Confident in the results, the company migrated £73.5M in payment volume across three countries onto a single unified platform.

"There's potentially a big risk in switching providers, so it's much easier to get buy-in when you can test properly," Russell said. "In our business, a 1% increase represents a very significant uplift in revenue. Thus, through A/B testing we were able to demonstrate a clear case for migrating to Stripe."

New payment methods grow to represent a majority of online transactions

TeamSport's new payment methods, including iDEAL, made an immediate difference. "Ninety percent of transactions in our businesses in the Netherlands go through iDEAL, so if you don't have that available for Dutch customers, your business is going to suffer," Russell said.

Just two months after adding Apple Pay, the wallet accounted for 53% of online transactions across regions. This again was tested before full deployment using Stripe's built in ability to conduct experiments for a set period and percentage of sessions.

Payment success rate increases 2.3 percentage points

TeamSport's move to Stripe resulted in an increase in its payment success rate from 94.85% to 97.15%. At the same time, the company was able to reduce the number of fields customers need to fill out by two-thirds without negatively affecting authorisation rates. "You want the customer to have the absolute minimum friction you can get away with for their checkout journey," Russell said. "We needed customers to fill out 15 online fields with our old provider and now we only need five, and one of those is prepopulated."

3 development days to integrate Stripe Reader S700

After adopting Terminal, TeamSport was able to prepare Reader S700 for deployment, including TeamSport's custom apps, in just three development days using Stripe's online setup resources. Once implemented, the sales and payment data could be matched without manual intervention, allowing the finance team to quickly and easily pull data from different territories and sites for side-by-side comparisons.

TeamSport builds a strong foundation for additional growth

Over the next five years, TeamSport expects to grow 20% to 30% by both adding new locations in the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany whilst also expanding the entertainment and food and beverage options available across locations. Russell is confident that the unified commerce experience he and his team have built with Stripe provides the foundation they need to accommodate that growth, along with the flexibility to adapt the company's payment architecture according to TeamSport's unique needs.

"One of the biggest benefits we've had working with Stripe is being able to do things ourselves and customise the technology to our needs," he said. "It's not a one-size-fits-all platform, and Stripe actually cares whether we are successful as a company."