How StarMaker Is Building a More Reliable Payment Experience in the U.S.

For digital entertainment platforms, a payment experience that balances reliability, security and ease of use can help turn purchase intent into lasting engagement.

Where Music, Connection and Digital Commerce Meet

StarMaker is a global social karaoke and music entertainment platform. With more than 50 million users worldwide, the platform brings together karaoke, live streaming and real-time voice rooms, giving people multiple ways to perform, connect and engage with its community.

StarMaker also offers virtual gifting, membership subscriptions and other value-added features. For users, these purchases are part of the entertainment experience itself. When payment works smoothly, the interaction feels continuous. When it does not, even a user who intends to return may leave the journey unfinished.

The Challenge: Protecting Both Conversion and Trust

As a digital entertainment business serves more users across markets, payment performance becomes a balancing act. Card changes, insufficient funds, issuer declines, technical interruptions and overly cautious risk decisions can all prevent legitimate transactions from being completed.

At the same time, reducing friction cannot come at the expense of security. The challenge is to identify genuine purchase intent more accurately, manage fraud exposure and apply authentication in a way that remains proportionate to transaction risk.

For StarMaker’s U.S. business, the priority was to make payment more reliable for legitimate users while keeping fraud risk and authentication friction under control.

Working with Oceanpayment

StarMaker works with Oceanpayment to strengthen payment reliability in the U.S. market. Rather than treating payment acceptance, risk management and user experience as separate issues, the collaboration brings them into one operating view.

Understanding Payment Outcomes

A more reliable payment experience starts with understanding why transactions do not go through. By examining payment outcomes and responding to different failure scenarios, the teams can focus on avoidable interruptions and support more consistent transaction completion for returning users.

Improving Fraud Recognition

Oceanpayment’s risk-management approach helps distinguish legitimate transactions from potentially fraudulent activity more precisely. This supports StarMaker in reducing fraud exposure without relying on unnecessarily broad controls that may also block genuine customers.

Keeping Authentication Proportionate

The collaboration also considers the appropriate application of 3D Secure (3DS), using additional authentication where risk warrants it while limiting unnecessary steps for lower-risk transactions.

The aim is not to optimize one metric in isolation, but to balance payment conversion, security and customer experience.

Reported Outcomes

The collaboration has delivered measurable improvements across repeat purchase, paying-user retention, customer experience and fraud management:

Together, these outcomes point to a broader role for payment in digital entertainment: not only enabling a purchase, but also helping platforms protect revenue continuity and sustain relationships with their paying communities.

“Payment reliability is an important part of user retention. By working with Oceanpayment, we have been able to reduce avoidable payment failures and provide a more consistent experience for returning users, helping us protect long-term relationships with our paying community.”

— Tim Miao, Monetization Director, StarMaker

More Than a Payment Endpoint

For digital entertainment platforms, sustainable growth depends on many small moments working as expected. Payment is one of them—and its impact extends beyond checkout.

When reliability, risk decisions and authentication are considered together, payment can become a more dependable part of the user relationship.

Through its work with StarMaker, Oceanpayment continues to support a payment experience designed around both business performance and genuine user intent.

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Build a more reliable payment experience for your digital business.

Talk to Oceanpayment about global acquiring, payment performance and risk management for digital entertainment.