Chai Direct Increases Conversions with PayPal’s Fastlane

Chai Direct, a one-stop shop of the world's leading chai tea brands and flavors, was founded by musician turned online entrepreneur Troy Stetina. Troy began his career as a rock guitarist, composer and author. He shifted his focus to chai and e-commerce when his brother - an Olympic cyclist and owner of a micro chai brewery, Third Street Chai, in Boulder, Colorado -- asked him to take over their online distribution. His passion for the chai industry grew and in 2009, Troy launched ChaiDirect.com.

_{Troy and Alexis Stetina, Chai Direct}

In 2022, Troy and Alexis relocated Chai Direct to New Mexico, a strategic move that enabled them to strengthen relationships with suppliers, revamp their e-commerce platform, and introduce additional payment options to enhance the customer experience even further.

Over the past year, Troy focused on expanding the business to include regional wholesaling with direct delivery, which required securing additional warehouse space. This growth not only increased storage capacity but also allowed them to trade in their lease and purchase their own commercial property near their home. These incremental changes had a transformative impact, positioning Chai Direct as a leading chai e-commerce business in the rapidly growing market.

"I quickly recognized that in the world of e-commerce, delivering an exceptional customer experience and finding the right technology partners to help grow your business, are some of the key foundations for success. Digging into our shopper insights, we really learned a lot about what inventory is successful for us, and that's helped streamline our operations and increase our profitability," Troy shared.

"Partnering with a globally trusted brand like PayPal was a no brainer. We have gained valuable shopper and inventory insights essential for growing Chai Direct, while offering diverse, reliable payment options customers expect." Chai Direct uses PayPal Complete Payments, a comprehensive suite of payment solutions that businesses can access through a single integration. Through PayPal Complete Payments, Troy can offer his customers a wide variety of payment options, enabling his customers to pay with their preferred payment option, whether that's a credit card, digital wallet or other alternative payment method.

In addition to using PayPal for checkout, Chai Direct uses PayPal's Fraud Protection Advanced solutions, which has transformed what used to be a significant challenge around unauthorized transactions, into a minor inconvenience, and has enabled Troy and his team to focus on the business itself rather than worrying about individual transactions.

Reflecting on his own journey as a small business owner, Troy offers fellow entrepreneurs the advice to "be ready to roll with the changes. You've got to stay flexible and test new ideas. When we were given the opportunity to participate in a new guest checkout solution by PayPal, we said yes, immediately."

Through PayPal Complete Payments, Chai Direct was able to enable Fastlane by PayPal to improve their guest checkout experience. Troy shared that Fastlane helped them avoid the summer slowdown and increase customer conversions. "Fastlane makes it easy for people to try our products and for us to grow our customer base," Troy shared. "Usually summer is our 'off' season, but this summer has not slowed at all - our conversion rate has increased 35 percent between August 2023 and August 2024 and I believe that Fastlane is largely responsible for that increase."

As the Chai Direct team prepares for the upcoming 2024 holiday shopping season, Troy reflected on what worked well for the business last year. "We had some good success last year by highlighting special holiday themed items as 'stocking stuffers,' and showcasing them on a special Holiday Gift Giving page." This turned out to be an easy way for current customers to try new products and share them with friends and family. "We're planning this year's list of items and the promos we'll do to highlight them. And now with Fastlane by PayPal, we are looking forward to it being even easier for our shoppers to gift these stocking stuffers to new potential Chai Direct fans."

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