Challenge

Founded in 2002, Dian Xiao Er has grown to 19 locations by pairing traditional Chinese herbal roast duck dishes with a modern dining experience. As the company expanded, it needed a way to manage rising labor costs and the high staff turnover common in the restaurant industry. Traditional workflows, including taking orders by hand and having servers handle checkout, required significant staffing while also making diners wait longer for their food and bill.

After a major brand refresh in 2022, the Singapore-based restaurant chain set out to modernize its operations for greater efficiency and a more convenient customer experience. Working with digital transformation consultant Apricus Ventures, Dian Xiao Er launched its own mobile app featuring self-service ordering and payment capabilities that would allow diners to order and pay from their table without waiting for a server.

Once the app went live, however, Dian Xiao Er discovered a bottleneck in the payment process that undermined the faster, more convenient dining experience it had set out to create. The payment provider that powered the app’s payment infrastructure couldn’t process concurrent transactions across all 19 Dian Xiao Er locations, which created reliability issues during peak dining periods. During weekend dinner service and high-traffic holidays like Chinese New Year and Mother’s Day, payments would frequently fail or stall, forcing customers to restart the checkout process and re-enter card details. The payment provider also only supported credit card payments, which meant the restaurant couldn’t accept the mobile-first payment methods that many Singapore customers prefer.

To create a more reliable in-app checkout experience and continue evolving its self-service dining model, Dian Xiao Er needed to find a new payment provider that could handle high transaction volumes without failure and accept a wider range of payment methods.

Solution

In 2025, Dian Xiao Er worked with Apricus Ventures to replace its previous payment provider with Stripe Payments, creating a more reliable checkout experience that could support high transaction volumes across all 19 locations.

Apricus recommended Stripe after evaluating Dian Xiao Er’s need for a payment provider that could reliably support concurrent transactions across its restaurants. Based on its experience implementing Stripe for other clients, Apricus believed Stripe stood out for its reliability, scalability, and comprehensive APIs and SDKs, which gave the team confidence that it could quickly integrate Stripe into the app.

“Apricus advised us to use Stripe because it could provide us with the stable payment gateway we were looking for. They knew it would help us deliver the customer experience we wanted, which is what matters most,” said Kim Yau Soh, executive director at Dian Xiao Er.

In addition to improving the app’s reliability, Dian Xiao Er used Payments to expand its range of payment methods beyond credit cards, including digital wallets such as Google Pay and Apple Pay.

Results

Dian Xiao Er migrates to Stripe in one week

Using Stripe’s comprehensive APIs and SDKs, Dian Xiao Er completed the migration to Payments in less than a week.

99.999% reliability eliminates payment failures during peak periods

Thanks to Stripe’s 99.999% uptime, Dian Xiao Er now processes more than 1,500 app orders a day across its 19 restaurants, even during peak dining periods and major holidays, without the recurring payment failures that previously required regular follow-up with its vendor.

Order-to-table times decrease by up to 40%

Customers can now place their order as soon as they are ready without waiting for a server, reducing service time by approximately 30%–40%.

“Customers can now order instantly instead of waiting for a busy server to take an order and bring that order back to the kitchen,” said Lwi Zhiping, executive director at Dian Xiao Er.

Digital wallets drive 70% of in-app transactions

Dian Xiao Er used Stripe to add Google Pay and Apple Pay, two payment methods that are widely used in Singapore. These digital wallets now account for 70% of all app-based payments, demonstrating customer preference for a mobile-first payment experience.

App adoption increases from 20% to 80%

Once it was confident its app could process payments reliably, Dian Xiao Er began encouraging diners to place orders and pay their bill through the app instead of through their server. As a result, approximately 80% of orders are now placed through the app, up from 20%, with more than 1,500 orders processed through the app every day.

Approximately $1 million SGD saved annually

Thanks to the popularity of the app, Dian Xiao Er has been able to optimize employee deployment across its outlets, allowing service staff to focus on enhancing the dining experience rather than taking orders. This has improved service efficiency and delivered an estimated $1 million SGD in annual labor cost savings.

“One of our main objectives with the app was to reduce our labor costs. Because most of the payments and ordering are now taking place in the app, we can reduce the number of staff we need during each shift while having our servers focus more on getting food to tables instead of processing the bill,” said Lwi.