Challenge

During the pandemic, Dines experienced a significant uplift in businesses relying on its best-in-class mobile-ordering solution processed via the Stripe online payments platform and protected with Stripe Radar. Leveraging Stripe Connect, it was able to offer payments and streamline payouts to hundreds of businesses operating under a new paradigm. However, as pandemic restrictions eased and guests started dining out again, restaurant and hospitality operators were overwhelmed by the different systems required to service a variety of consumer dining preferences, including mobile orders, countertop service, and tableside dining. Dines realised that businesses using third-party systems for in-person ordering were experiencing a host of challenges: longer wait times for orders, more customer complaints, the inability to support multiparty payouts or issue adjustments and partial refunds for mobile orders. The startup knew that the best way to streamline operations and reduce the workload for operators was to process all payments through one service.

Solution

Dines chose to implement Stripe Terminal and, thanks to a straightforward implementation process, was able to offer users a unified hospitality management experience in less than two weeks. “We chose to partner with Stripe because of how flexible the Terminal solution is and how easy it was to complement our existing offering,” said Craig Tweedy, chief technology officer at Dines. Using Terminal with Connect had additional advantages, such as a single onboarding flow for both online and in-person payments and integrated platform management with online and in-person payments showing up in unified tax reporting.

Results

After introducing Stripe Terminal, Dines has seen a 150% increase in revenues per venue and is on track to achieve 4x year-on-year growth in transaction volumes. While online payments continue to support the convenience and flexibility of mobile ordering and checkout, in-person payments now account for 75%+ of payments processed on Dines. Restaurants have found that the BBPOS WisePad 3 reader’s reliability and portability make tableside ordering and payments more efficient, resulting in faster table turnover and fewer human errors, with businesses seeing up to 50% reductions in food wastage. And unified reconciliation and reporting across mobile and in-person payments has simplified back-of-the-house operations, saving larger hospitality groups up to 40 hours a week on administrative duties and boosting staff satisfaction. “Their staff now enjoy using one single source of truth for all in-person and online orders, as opposed to multiple different products servicing different channels. This makes it effortless to manage orders regardless of how customers choose to pay: on their phones using mobile ordering powered by Stripe Payments API, or in person by card, or contactless with a Stripe Terminal device,” said Adam Umarji, cofounder and chief financial officer at Dines. “Our clients run incredibly busy venues, where fast and secure payments are paramount to ensure a smooth flow of orders, especially at peak times for bars and restaurants. So knowing that Stripe is reliably taking care of all payment processing without breaking a sweat (even during the crazy peaks of trade we’re seeing with thousands of transactions happening back-to-back at the Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival) is a huge weight off our shoulders as software providers.”