By Ricardo Bilton. This article originally appeared on VentureBeat, September 9, 2013.
If the boundaries between mobile devices and the web are blurring, does it make sense to have checkout platforms created solely for either one?
Payments platform Zooz doesn’t think so. The company is rolling a new HTML5-based checkout product, which it says will offer a more unified experience across both devices and platforms.
“In payments, it’s not just the backend and thinks like API integration that matters. You also have to make the entire experience very user-friendly,” says Zooz business development VP Noam Inbar.
Core to making things more user-friendly, Inbar says, is to make the entire checkout process as universal as possible. And that’s where HTML5 comes in: By creating a unified, adaptive checkout experience, Zooz says it can further erase the boundaries between platforms. Android, iOS, the web — if Zooz has its way, buying things on any platform will always feel the same.
All of which is good news for merchants, because the more familiar the checkout process is, the more likely customers are to actually complete their purchases. No more abandoned shopping carts.
So far, the Zooz approach seems to be working well. The company recently raised $2 million and, more recently, has attracted the attention of payment processing giant First Data, which will be Zooz’s official processing partner in the U.S.