Fivestars Revolutionizes Local Retail Loyalty by Integrating Payments

“Infinicept’s system made it incredibly easy to get up and running as a payment facilitator and saved us a lot of time and engineering development. We did it all with just one incremental hire!”

MATT DOKA
CO-FOUNDER & CTO
FIVESTARS

Background

Fivestars’ mission is to fight for communities and local businesses by turning transactions into relationships. They do this by providing local retail businesses with a software platform that acts as their complete marketing operating system including a CRM, a way to message all their customers, marketing automation, a loyalty engine, and new customer acquisition tools.

Fivestars’ software platform enables local retailers to create a unique rewards program, build a customer loyalty database and connect with every customer in that database at the right time using marketing automation.

Why Did Fivestars Become A Payment Facilitator?

Prior to integrating payments, Fivestars’ marketing platform was separate from the checkout process, creating a fragmented sign-up experience for retail customers. Requiring end users to checkout on one device and sign-up for the Fivestars loyalty program on a separate device negatively impacted the overall sign-up rates for local retailers, which limited Fivestars’ overall benefits for its merchants.

Fivestars needed to take control over the hardware used at checkout in order to build a more unified product and maximize the value that they provide to local businesses. Becoming a payment facilitator allowed Fivestars to integrate payments into their overall product offering and build the customer experience they were hoping to achieve.

Fivestars’ new all-in-one payments and loyalty platform greatly increases the efficiency and effectiveness of Fivestars’ product, creating a better loyalty experience for Fivestars’ small merchant customers and a more seamless checkout process for the end user.

How Did Infinicept Enable Fivestars To Be A Payment Facilitator?

Infinicept's end-to-end solution allowed Fivestars to quickly get up and running as a payment facilitator, providing them with the necessary payments infrastructure and expertise they needed.

The Infinicept platform equipped Fivestars with all of the technology required to operate as a payment facilitator, service their customers’ payments needs and underwrite new merchants in a highly efficient way. Utilizing Infinicept's complete underwriting and merchant management solution, Fivestars was able to go live as a payment facilitator with only one incremental full-time employee managing the payments operations. With Infinicept's prebuilt integrations into the payment processing infrastructure, technical integration and deployment is seamless for new payment facilitators.

Infinicept's Launch Services created a smooth transition to integrated payments for Fivestars by providing them with the payments industry expertise they needed to be successful. As there are many partners to choose from to build your overall payments stack, Infinicept acted as the payments guide for Fivestars, helping them to select the right partners for their unique product. Infinicept also ensured those partners allowed Fivestars to have the flexibility to efficiently grow and refine their payments product, and more importantly, to ensure those vendors could support the brick-and-mortar product experience Fivestars was focused on delivering.

The services Infinicept provided also included the logistical aspects of owning your payments, including building the operational policies and procedures and training the internal staff. This allowed Fivestars to run an efficient payments operation while giving them the ability to focus on what makes them successful: building a great software platform.

Results

Utilizing Infinicept to become a payment facilitator enabled Fivestars to launch Fivestars Pay, a POS system for retailers that is integrated into Fivestars’ marketing and loyalty platform. This all-in-one solution has dramatically increased the platform’s efficiency and more importantly, the ROI for Fivestars merchants.

Fivestars now has over 1,000 merchants using their payment platform and, on average, merchants with the integrated product are seeing the customer participation rate into the loyalty program more than double compared to the non-integrated, marketing-only product. This improved product and customer experience is greatly improving Fivestars’ customer retention.

Fivestars’ payments product also introduces additional revenue streams. Owning much of the payments process allows Fivestars to help simplify their merchants’ payments, reducing cost and complexity for them, while also passing along some of those gains to Fivestars.

By owning their payments, Fivestars is able to create new opportunities for future product development, furthering the integration between payments and loyalty.

Hear Matt Doka COO of Fivestars Tell You the Story Himself

“Thanks to Infinicept, we believe a world is coming soon where players like us won’t have to do any payments work, but will be able to build exactly the experiences that customers want around checkout.”