YC-Backed Two Tap Wants To Fix Mobile Checkouts

Shopping cart abandonment is a massive problem on mobile, and the Y Combinator-backed Two Tap aims to improve this for merchants and affiliate sites.

It’s no secret that mobile checkouts are broken. Not only is putting your credit card info a major hassle on mobile, but many merchants don’t even have acceptable mobile sites. As users now often discover products they want to buy on social sites like Pinterest, making it fast and easy to also buy on mobile is becoming imperative for sellers.

Two Tap is essentially a mediator between the user and the company’s online ordering system. It doesn’t manage any money itself (though it stores credit card data on its PCI-compliant servers). Instead, it presents the user to the merchant and handles the checkout process for them. This way, you just sign in to your Two Tap account and you are done with the checkout in – you guessed it – two taps.

Shopping-Cart As the company’s founders Radu Spineanu and Razvan Roman told me, the company’s focus is mostly on B2B right now, though it also offers a Chrome extension for avid online shoppers that makes checking out on the sites of over 100 merchants easier. This includes a global shopping cart, so if you see one thing on Nordstrom’s website and one on Macy’s, you can just put them all into the same cart and then order both items with a single click and Two Tap will handle the rest.

For the most part, though, the company is focused on working with merchants and affiliate sites directly.

Developers can integrate the service with the help of an API for their mobile apps and on their websites. Developers can use the API to build their own check-out flows or just integrate the HTML5 interface and pass the product URL on to Two Tap, which takes it from there.

The service is already in use by the likes of Kiip, Shopsy and similar services. On the web, Shoelovers also uses it to help the 5 million shoe fanatics on its site buy even more shoes from its website and mobile app. They just have to click the “Buy” button, and instead of being taken to a vendor’s cumbersome mobile site, they can buy right from Shoelovers’ site.

Because Two Tap is focusing so heavily on affiliate sites, its pricing model is also geared toward these kinds of services. The company takes a cut from the affiliate fees a given service generates, though for merchants who want to use the service, it also offers a per-transaction price.

After the first time you use the service, all your information is stored in your Two Tap wallet, so you never have to type it again.

As Spineanu and Roman told me, they have been working on this product for about a year-and-a-half and the company now has eight employees (mostly engineers). At first, they worried that merchants would not appreciate the service because it gets in between the customer and them, but in the end, Roman said, the merchants want sales and that’s what Two Tap aims to bring them.

The company, which was previously known as Amber.io, has also been experimenting with bringing its service to mobile ads, so users can buy a product right from an ad. The problem with this is that the intent to buy is typically missing when users see an ad, so conversion rates tend to be low. The company plans to take a closer look at ads in the future, though.