Case study: Bikes Online upgrades its payments platform

Bicycle e-commerce store Bikes Online has tripled its business since 2020. The store began selling in the US in 2019 and has experienced 10 times growth due to implementing a new e-commerce-based solution.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Jonathan Allara, co-founder and CEO of Bikes Online on how the company grew its e-commerce presence.

Bikes Online began as a team of two owning and running a rental bike shop in Manly. Allara said during his time there he noticed there was an opportunity to buy bikes directly from the factory and sell them directly to consumers on the internet.

He said, “We were growing quite strongly before COVID, 40 to 50 percent a year before COVID hit. Once we were set up in the US and with the help of Stripe and Maropost, and all the systems in the team that we had in place, we were in a strong position to benefit from a significant uplift in online shopping.

“The required scale that we needed to get to quickly was probably would not have been able to happen without the technology partners that we had in place.”

The new solution helps them with detecting and removing fraudulent payments.

Allara explained, “When you look at a product like ours, it's a high-ticket item, it's a major purchase for people. When you have an instance of fraud with assets, it can be hundreds, often sometimes thousands of dollars in lost revenue, because you haven't been able to capture that risk.

“The Stripe Radar tool has not only protected us, but saves more than $10,000 a month in fraud. It's also been able to weed out what's a legitimate transaction and what's not a legitimate transaction.”

Allara said previous solutions they’ve had have mistaken legitimate transactions for fraudulent transactions.

He said, “We've had we've missed an opportunity where there have been legitimate transactions that have a have been attempted on our checkout, but were rejected because the AI behind it wasn't as strong. We gained an extra $40,000 a month from that feature from Stripe Radar.”