Strawberrynet scales to 100+ markets with AI-driven payments

Introducing Strawberrynet

With nearly 30 years of global expertise, Strawberrynet was founded on a straightforward market insight: beauty enthusiasts worldwide crave a more accessible, diverse, and frictionless digital shopping experience. By executing a model that fuses an extensive product catalogue with localised online storefronts, the brand successfully cultivated a community of over a million members worldwide in over 100 countries.

Zoie Ng

eCommerce Sales and Marketing Manager of Strawberrynet

"The larger a cross-border eCommerce business grows, the more complex its payment challenges become. If Strawberrynet continued to rely on legacy systems, our growth potential would be severely restricted. Airwallex doesn't just simplify our day-to-day transaction flows – they ensure we are agile enough to enter new markets and accept new currencies at a moment’s notice."

The challenge

Sustaining operational excellence across a global eCommerce footprint requires a strong payments and treasury infrastructure. Because its transactions span multiple geographies, any minor friction in the checkout flow or a dip in authorisation success rates can instantly stall top-line growth.

As international checkout traffic and supplier volumes grew, Strawberrynet’s traditional payment setup created three critical bottlenecks:

Fragmented payment acceptance hurt conversion and local customer trust

Checkout trust is a key driver of eCommerce conversion, but payment preferences differ by market. Strawberrynet’s legacy payment setup couldn’t easily support the local methods customers expected – from credit cards in Hong Kong and Kakao Pay in South Korea, to PIX in Brazil – leading to cart abandonment at the final step. Cross-border transactions were also exposed to technical declines from latency and sub-optimal routing, and without smart retry tools, these false declines translated directly into lost revenue.

Rigid overseas account setups slowed market entry timelines

For a cross-border eCommerce brand, a solid financial foundation is just as critical as the front-end shopping experience.Previously, establishing an operational presence in a new target market like Israel or New Zealand required opening local bank accounts, involving slow onboarding turnarounds, heavy documentation requirements, and occasional physical travel. This administrative latency dragged out market deployment timelines, causing the brand to miss vital seasonal windows.

High-friction SWIFT transfers slowed supplier payments

Managing an ecosystem of over 1,000 suppliers and 800 global brands demands liquid capital allocation. When settling wholesale balances through traditional telegraphic transfers, funds routinely took three to five business days to clear. This friction was compounded by high SWIFT fees and opaque FX spreads. These payment delays occasionally disrupted inventory replenishment schedules, tied up working capital in transit, and put undue strain on key supplier relationships.

Zoie Ng

eCommerce Sales and Marketing Manager of Strawberrynet

"Managing multiple distinct portals and navigating scattered regional payment networks was an immense operational drain. Airwallex’s consolidated ecosystem cut straight through that administrative noise, giving our team the flexibility to focus purely on creating an elite shopping journey for our global audience."

The solution

Airwallex equipped Strawberrynet with a centralised global financial stack that unifies payment acceptance, multi-currency accounts, and fast local payouts on a single platform.

Using Optimize 360 to recover revenue from technical declines

Strawberrynet upgraded its storefronts with Airwallex’s AI-powered optimisation engine. Checkout now automatically localises language, pricing, and payment methods based on the shopper’s location, and uses machine-learning optimisation and smart retries to improve card acceptance. When a legitimate transaction fails for a technical reason, Airwallex can automatically retry via a better routing path, recovering revenue that would otherwise be lost. Concurrently, the built-in AI fraud prevention suite assesses risk signals on the fly, triggering 3D secure verification only when necessary to preserve a frictionless checkout flow, while fully adhering to global SCA and PSD2 compliance standards.

Deploying Global Accounts to enable efficient same-currency settlement

Strawberrynet pivoted from traditional bricks-and-mortar international banking setups. Now, as Strawberrynet expands into new markets or adds currencies, the team can open Global Accounts entirely online instantly. These multi-currency accounts let Strawberrynet collect and settle in local currencies, match incoming payments to same-currency balances, and avoid forced conversions. That reduces FX leakage and simplifies global cash management.

Using local payment rails to speed up global supplier payouts

To fund supplier settlements and operating expenses, Strawberrynet moved from traditional cross-border transfers to Airwallex’s local payout network. The finance team now pays vendors in 120+ countries via local rails, with most transfers arriving the same day and FX costs reduced by up to 80%. This faster, lower-cost payout flow helps keep inventory moving and preserves working capital.

Marcus Wong

IT Director of Strawberrynet

"To maintain an edge in a high-velocity eCommerce landscape, an enterprise needs a financial ecosystem that scales dynamically with its ambitions. By automating administrative tasks, our finance and development teams can view multi-currency transaction streams with absolute clarity, turning transaction reliability into a tool for sustainable growth."

The result

By consolidating its cross-border workflows with Airwallex, Strawberrynet realised immediate operational efficiencies and tangible commercial gains:

• Higher checkout conversion: By aligning checkout flows with local consumer preferences and activating AI-driven smart retry mechanics, the brand reduced artificial checkout friction and converted international site traffic into realised top-line revenue.

• Peak-season resilience at 99.999% uptime: During massive global shopping events like Double 11 and Black Friday, Airwallex’s core payment gateway sustained 99.999% operational uptime, protecting revenues from unnecessary technical declines and hidden processing inefficiencies.

• Faster, lower-cost cross-border payouts: The combination of instantly available Global Accounts and fast local payment networks compressed market deployment timelines and reduced international FX cost overheads by up to 80%, supporting more confident inventory planning and enhanced supplier relationships.

Reflecting on Strawberrynet’s expansion, Zoie offers this advice to brands going global, "Behind every successful transaction is the trust a customer places in the brand. As our global financial partner, Airwallex allows us to explore new markets with greater peace of mind and accelerate our pace of deployment."