Fresh Car layers a modular payment stack into its franchise
Fresh Car Valeting, grew from one founder cleaning cars into a nationwide franchise network. After outgrowing Stripe, Fresh Car moved its franchise payments to Ryft and is now preparing for a full marketplace rollout.
Sam founded Fresh Car 11 years ago, cleaning cars himself before building a team. Around five years in, his best technicians wanted to leave and set up alone. Sam decided to join them rather than compete, and turned Fresh Car into a franchise business. The network went nationwide within five years, reaching full UK coverage by 2022.
Customers then began asking for more than valeting, so Fresh Car is expanding into bodywork repairs and, more recently, mechanical repairs. Skilled technicians are hard to train, so new business increasingly comes through a marketplace of independent specialists, not direct employees.
Fresh Car initially took payments in cash and card readers. As the franchise network began to grow they needed to turn to a payment solution moving online with Stripe.
Stripe met Fresh Car's everyday payment needs, but its flat-rate pricing did not reflect a growing franchise's volume. Fresh Car could not access bespoke pricing or dedicated account support as a scaling business.
As our volume was going up, our price was the same as someone who'd just joined. It just didn't make sense to stay with Stripe
Sam had already heard about Ryft through recommendations from other business owners running marketplaces. When Ryft co-founder Alex Mackenzie got in touch, the timing lined up with Fresh Car’s roadmap.
Before the transition to Ryft, Fresh Car undertook a significant restructuring of its software systems. Once this foundational work was completed, the integration of Ryft was executed swiftly and efficiently., the process went smoothly and without any complications.
I liked that it was a UK-based business with dedicated human support, and it was specilised in marketplace payments. The volume-based pricing and bundled fee structure was more aligned to our business's growth plans
Ryft currently powers the valet and franchise side of Fresh Car's business. Fresh Car is now building out the next stage of the business with mechanical repairs. These will be delivered through a marketplace of independent repair technicians.
As it takes shape, Ryft is being layered in as a modular payment stack. Rather than upfront payment, Fresh Car holds the customer's card on file, using Ryft's delayed payment capture. Fresh Car has built its own bespoke logic, so a payout triggers once a repairer marks a job complete.
This gives Fresh Car the flexibility to customise payments per franchise. It also keeps a single, unified view across the whole network, from one integration.
Some franchisees also want more control over payment timing. They can choose to require payment upfront only, rather than offering pay later at all.
This new function in the business is much more complicated than the one-off payments we take today, and it's more aligned with what Ryft is built for: complex payment flows. It's a vote of confidence that we want to utilise Ryft across all our network and offerings.
Key Benefits
Franchise-ready payments: pay now or pay later handled smoothly across a nationwide franchise network.
Costs that scale with growth: volume-based pricing in place of Stripe's flat-rate fees.
Low-disruption implementation: lean team went live without issues, even mid software rebuild.
Built for what's next: split payments and delayed payments ready to support Fresh Car's move into third-party repairer payouts and commission splits.
Payments is a back-end function. You only think about it when it's not working, and for us it's been plain sailing.
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