Online orders and food delivery have been a saving grace for people who didn’t have the option of home-cooked food as restaurants and dine-out options were shut for several months due to the multiple lockdowns during the pandemic.
The emergence of food delivery apps and websites with ties to multiple restaurants and cloud kitchens, coupled with customer expectations of fast service, have now made food delivery a major category in the dining landscape. Though food delivery is booming and expanding, there is still a gap between availability, accessibility, and delivery of niche, authentic regional specialities from various states across India.
For those missing out on favourite regional tastes and aromas of food when they are away from home or have moved to a different city and cannot access it, The State Plate is on a mission to sell high-quality, authentic food products from different states of India.
About The State Plate
The State Plate leverages the vast network of cooks engaged in preparing authentic food products who also embrace the amazing diversity of food that our country offers. Their website sells sweets, snacks, and savouries – from multiple states across the country with the promise of authenticity and reliability. As the scope and scale of their business grew and their workforce increased, they started partnering with big-name retailers to improve their visibility. Hence, the demand for The State Plate’s services wasn’t surprising.
As a result, The State Plate, which initially started as a company that only onboarded businesses making authentic food products, itself became a brand that started to sell 50+ products of its own. The State Plate’s business blueprint revolves around providing regional food favourites online so that people staying away from their home or hometown can order their favourite regional snacks and sweets.
Their vision? To produce and distribute authentic regional food products synonymous with The State Plate in India and abroad. The State Plate is hoping to build a one-stop destination for all traditional regional food needs across India and eventually around the world.
The initial hurdles and limitations
High payment failures leading to revenue loss
Muskan Sancheti and Raghav Jhawar, founders of The State Plate, were new to the e-commerce market when they started the company. Initially, they had partnered up with a payments solution that required cumbersome integration processes and had higher payment failures. They realised that payment failures were negatively impacting the user experience, hindering revenue growth, and resulting in shopping cart abandonment. The State Plate wanted something that prevented this very problem.
Poor checkout experience for customers
To improve the online payments experience for their customers, The State Plate was looking for a payments solution that was reliable, easy to start using, and useful in scaling their business across cities. Providing a seamless and frictionless checkout experience, in order to encourage customers to stay and complete purchases, was the need of the hour. Improving payment success rates and making it easier for customers to find their favourite payment methods were both key parts of the checkout experience.
Razorpay – the ideal partner for online payments
As they were expanding, The State Plate moved their website to the Shopify e-commerce platform. After exploring multiple payment solutions to meet their needs, The State Plate signed up with Razorpay, as it came highly recommended by other businesses who themselves had enjoyed a great payment experience with Razorpay.
Easy integration and onboarding
Integrating the Razorpay plugin on The State Plate’s Shopify store required zero coding effort. Their team could quickly and easily set up our payment gateway for website without any integration issues. This proved to be a welcoming change and aligned with all their requirements as integration was quick and easy and approval to accept payments was instant.
“When we started our journey on Shopify, Razorpay became an obvious choice for us. It was extremely easy to integrate, we just had to copy and enter the API keys. Our payments have been operating successfully and seamlessly for the past two years.”
Efficient automation and an improvement in success rates
Razorpay’s straightforward interface and automated dashboard came as an instant relief to all the manual effort put into handling payments. Not only did the customer experience improve, but the overall payment success rates also improved to a never before seen benchmark of greater than 70%.
As a result of improved success rates and efficient automation, the payment failures for orders, shopping cart abandonment rates, and revenue losses were plugged to a large extent. The State Plate started their journey by listing multiple payment gateways on the checkout page and realised that over 90% of their customers were paying through Razorpay only!
The added advantage of The Razorpay Trusted Badge
The State Plate has an excellent track record of solving customer escalations proactively and hence became eligible for The Razorpay Trusted Badge, which is Razorpay’s exclusive offering available only to the most trusted businesses.
Upcoming e-commerce and D2C businesses can benefit from the trust marker tag that’ll help them instil trust in customers of their reliability and credibility. Customer trust is crucial for online businesses as it improves brand credibility, further enabling businesses to expand their customer base, earn referrals and improve customer retention.
Increase in payment conversions
The impact of having this Razorpay Trusted Badge was almost immediate. Since their customers could see the badge on their checkout page and be reassured that they can safely transact with them without hesitation, The State Plate observed a 5.5% increase in conversion at the checkout! This led to improved purchase conversion, reduced shopping cart abandonment, and boosted the percentage share of online payments.
The State Plate and Razorpay – a dynamic duo
With a vast network of authentic chefs and distributors across 5+ states in India, an array of unique food products, and a booming market, The State Plate is only set to scale greater heights, and we are elated to be their payments and growth partner every step of the way.
