Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses, announced its work with Best Buy in order “to help power the retailer’s expansion into prescription health and wellness technology products.”
Stripe explains that it “provides the payments infrastructure for Best Buy’s new platform, Wellness.BestBuyHealth.com, a new convenient online experience where continuous glucose monitoring devices (CGMs) are now sold to eligible customers.”
As a result of working with Stripe to help offer prescription CGMs “to eligible customers, Best Buy will benefit from API reliability consistently exceeding 99.999% uptime.”
Eileen O’Mara, chief revenue officer at Stripe, said:
“Stripe is thrilled to accelerate the expansion of Best Buy’s health and wellness category as they sell prescription based medical devices for the first time.”
With Stripe, Best Buy was able to easily integrate payments into Wellness.BestBuyHealth.com, allowing it to go to market sooner with “technology and expertise that enriches and saves lives,” the company explained when it announced the expansion.
Stripe helps large retailers and businesses “maximize payment authorizations with tools like Stripe Radar, Enhanced Issuer Network, Network Tokens, Card Account Updater, and more. With Stripe, businesses have generated billions in additional revenue as a result of fewer legitimate charges being declined.”
As covered late last year, it was reported that from Black Friday through Cyber Monday (BFCM), Stripe processed more than 300 million transactions with “a total payment volume of more than $18.6 billion.”
It was reportedly the “largest ever” four-day period on Stripe.
A Stripe public microsite “tracked these and a dozen other BFCM metrics in real-time, including the uptime of the Stripe API.” During this period of intense activity, the Stripe API maintained availability greater than 99.999%, “with a peak of 27,395 requests per second.”
The term Black Friday was coined in Philadelphia in the 1960s, “to characterize the way physical infrastructure struggled under heightened volume as crowds surged downtown at the start of the Christmas season.”
The way people shop has changed a lot since then. Today, nearly half of all shopping around the weekend after Thanksgiving “takes place online, which is why since 2005, the period has been known as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. But the holiday spending spree is still an infrastructure test—though now of digital financial infrastructure as much as physical roads and stores.”
This BFCM, Stripe handled a peak volume “of 93,304 transactions per minute, while maintaining API uptime greater than 99.999%.”
