PayPal Stories Archive

 

 

The holiday shopping rush is nothing new for businesses of any size, but it can be a particularly intense time for Tipsy Elves – the seasonal, quirky apparel manufacturer caught many people’s attention after being featured on the popular ABC reality series with sharks who invest in entrepreneurs.

 

Tipsy Elves was started in 2011 by college friends Nick Morton and Evan Mendelsohn. They were both working other jobs—Nick as a dentist and Evan as a lawyer. They had attended ugly Christmas sweater parties in college and knew there was a huge demand during the holiday season, but realized no one was actually selling them online. In additional to holiday apparel, Tipsy Elves now sells patriotic gear, St. Patrick’s Day products, beach collections and even Halloween products – so they’ve truly become a year-round business.

 

The company saw more than a whopping 1,000% increase in sales volume between October and December last year. And that is an additional 160+% lift year-over-year from 2014 to 2015. 

 

So how do they do it? Aside from selling fun products that are a huge hit with consumers, particularly through peak sales seasons like the holidays, Tipsy Elves relies on PayPal for a variety of products and services to take care of payments so they can focus on their growing business.

 

The company initially integrated PayPal at checkout, including features such One Touch™, which allows consumers to cut down significant time for holiday shopping when buying their ugly Christmas sweater this season. 

 

With One Touch™ enabled, buyers can skip entering their login and billing information and just click “Buy.” Whether it’s a phone, tablet or desktop consumers can also enable One Touch™ independently on each of their devices. It’s also quick; no financial information is shared with individual retailers.

 

In addition to these capabilities, Tipsy Elves has recently deepened its relationship with PayPal by integrating Braintree. As they continued to grow they added features such as Checkout Flow to help reduce cart abandonment, Buyer Protection for peace of mind, and Return Shipping on Us as a value-add service.

 

The web-only retailer is getting ready to re-launch its website this month with a mobile focus. Right now, half of the brand’s sales come through mobile which accounts for 60% of its traffic. The redesigned site will be more user friendly, with a focus on how the look and feel on a smartphone and more secure payment transactions through PayPal’s Braintree integration.

 

With Braintree, the customer payment information—including billing and mailing addresses—goes directly to PayPal without passing through Tipsy Elves’ servers. Credit card information is also tokenized which provides an extra layer of security and one less thing for Tipsy Elves to worry about.

 

The company has gone from selling $400,000 worth of inventory in one year to being able to sell that much in just one day. Scalability continues to be crucial to the brand’s survival. By partnering with PayPal, they are ensuring they can continue to grow and scale to meet customer demand while rest assured that their credit card and payments processing is being taken care of by experts.

 

Watch this video to hear Tipsy Elves’ story.