Scaling Payment Experience Insights with Agentic Intelligence
Delivering expert-grade checkout guidance to brands, faster and more consistently with AI.
Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform used by merchants across B2C retail, subscription businesses, and B2B SaaS. Helping those businesses deliver clear, reliable checkout experiences is critical to driving conversion, but evaluating those flows at scale has traditionally required significant manual effort. Orium partnered with Stripe to streamline that work through SPARk, a custom agentic application that evaluates publicly accessible payment journeys and delivers clear, evidence-backed recommendations aligned with Stripe's best practices.
The Challenge
Stripe's teams regularly review merchant sites to understand how effectively payment options are presented, subscriptions and upgrades are supported, pricing is communicated, and errors are handled across regions and devices. These reviews are an important input into merchant conversations, helping identify opportunities to improve checkout performance and reduce friction.
While the process delivered strong insights, it relied heavily on manual navigation, documentation, and screenshot capture across complex, multi-step flows. As demand for these reviews increased, scaling the work without losing consistency or clarity became increasingly difficult.
Stripe and Orium set out to find a way to preserve the depth of an expert-led review while making the process faster, more repeatable, and easier to extend across a broad and diverse merchant base.
The Strategy
The teams aligned on a simple goal: enable commerce platforms to deliver expert-grade payment experience guidance more efficiently, without changing the substance of what merchants receive. Rather than introducing a new methodology, the solution would be grounded in Stripe's existing best practices and evaluation framework.
Orium worked with Stripe to translate this framework into an intelligent, adaptable system capable of evaluating different business models, including B2C retail, subscription-based experiences, and B2B SaaS flows. The emphasis was on clarity and credibility. Each finding needed to be supported by visual evidence and framed in a way that was easy for merchants to understand and act on.
The Solution
Orium and Stripe created SPARk (Stripe Payment Assessment & Recommendations), a custom agentic application that evaluates end-to-end payment experiences and produces structured, evidence-backed insights. A reviewer enters a merchant URL, selects the appropriate business model, and launches a run that mirrors how a human expert would navigate the site's checkout and billing flows.
The system reviews publicly accessible pages and interactions, capturing screenshots and observations tied directly to Stripe's payment experience best practices. Results are compiled into a clear, shareable package that highlights what's working well, where friction exists, and how merchants can improve.
By automating the most time-consuming parts of the review process, SPARk enables assessment teams to spend more time on interpretation, conversation, and strategic guidance.
Outcomes & Next Steps
With SPARk, assessors can deliver payment experience insights faster and more consistently, without compromising quality. Reviews that once required hours of manual work now run in a fraction of the time, giving Stripe's experts more capacity to engage with merchants and focus on higher-value analysis.
Each assessment provides clear outcomes, visual evidence, and recommendations aligned with Stripe's best practices, making it easier for merchants to understand what matters and why. The result is a more scalable way for Stripe to support better checkout experiences across a wide range of business models.
Next, Stripe plans to expand SPARk's use across more teams and merchant scenarios, continuously refining recommendations as payment experiences evolve. As Stripe's guidance grows, SPARk will evolve alongside it, helping ensure merchants receive timely, relevant, and actionable insights that support clearer, faster, and more effective payment journeys.
