Two Tap

If you’ve ever tried to buy anything from your smart phone, chances are you’ve probably quit in the middle of the process—beginning to type in your shipping address then giving up before even entering your credit card. The combination of a small screen, tiny keyboard and long list of fields to fill in is enough to stop any purchase in its tracks.

You aren’t the only quitter. Ninety-eight percent of shopping carts created on mobile platforms are abandoned, says Two Tap co-founder and CEO Razvan Roman. And it isn’t just a problem for frustrated consumers, but also for retailers and app developers whose apps curate and compare products.

“We’re jumping on that opportunity and building this unified checkout process for all merchants,” Roman says. “We strip it down to the essentials.”

By acting as a go-between for users and e-commerce sites, Two Tap aims to cut the long process down to—you guessed it— two steps.

How it works

Two Tap integrates with mobile apps so publishers can sell products directly. Users browsing a product-focused app—think Pinterest, Polyvore and Wanelo—decide to buy, then input their shipping and billing information without leaving the app. Two Tap checks out with the merchant for the user, so shoppers get the same confirmation email they would have had they made the purchase on the retailer’s website themselves. From then on, your payment information is linked to your phone number. The next time you buy something in the app, you just enter your email address and get a text message with a few-digit confirmation code. Type in that code and confirm your purchase with your credit card’s CVV code for security—and you’re done.

“You’re kept within the same app experience and it’s just very convenient for you,” Roman says. “It’s a streamlined process and it doesn’t take you away from your normal experience.”

True Tap is free to use for consumers and merchants. The company makes money by taking a 15 percent cut of the commission app developers get from retailers on purchases sent through their apps.

“[App developers’] main focus is generating that intention to buy within consumers,” Roman says. “But when you want to buy, there’s a disconnect—you have to start an experience with a retailer. What we’re giving app developers is a way to streamline the process and have this last piece of the puzzle that’s currently missing from every app out there that does product-centered publishing.”

Streamlining for three sets of stakeholders

Two computer science grads who met in the online community of their native Romania, CEO Roman and co-founder Radu Spineanu bring experience in affiliate marketing, e-commerce, mobile technology and multiple startups to the project. Though it’s clear how Two Tap benefits consumers, the founders say smart phone shoppers aren’t the only ones with something to gain. App developers are excited that the platform gives them a way to monetize that’s an alternative to the faulty ad model.

“We’re building an API that sits on top of all e-commerce and allows app developers to monetize their users via e-commerce, which actually provides them with a real use case and actually engages their users even more in their apps,” Spineanu says. “It’s a completely new revenue [stream] for mobile—one that is probably going to change everything.”

Two Tap has more than 100 app developers, each with at least 500,000 users, interested in signing up, according to the founders. Kiip, a reward-based network app integrated with Two Tap, is seeing between 40 and 150 percent increase in conversion.

Retailers stand to see large increases in sales, even though they don’t need to do anything to integrate the platform, Roman says. While Google Wallet and similar competitors require deep integration within merchant sites, Two Tap works with a store’s chosen payment processor and sits on top of the existing technology stack.

Two Tap has developed innovative tools that allow them to integrate with thousands of stores and keep up with changes to their websites—without an army of programmers.

“Instead of hiring a very expensive programmer that costs like 150k per year and would go and look in the file and try to fix the script, we’ve created a system where people can use our tools to fix those issues,” Spineanu says. “And these people are non-programmers. So we’re able to solve all those issues at a fraction of the cost.”