Online shopping can be a breeze when you’re a pro. However, even the savviest online shoppers can find online checkout experiences to be extraneous.
In fact, 7 out of every 10 customers will abandon their cart due to difficulties, according to Sleek Note. Since checkout concerns hit home for founder Samuel Eze — who observed the frustration of his mother’s shopping experiences — he decided to found Nigerian startup OnePass to rectify e-commerce checkout problems.
“I watched my mother struggle to shop online where I saw her set up multiple accounts on different platforms while going through a rigorous checkout process,” Eze shared with TechCrunch. “In many cases, she ended up dropping the card and moving on to a different online store. Seeing the same pattern happen with other friends and family, I had to dive into it and found that it was actually a major headache for consumers and online retailers.”
To ease the headache, Eze designed a platform that allows shoppers to navigate various carts in one click. The mobile application requires first-time users to create an account to build a customer profile. The information can only be passed along to other merchants with OurPass’ API linked to the company.
“We built an identity layer across the web to enable consumer identity to be sent across to every single online store they go to checkout from,” Eze revealed to TechCrunch.
In addition, OurPass has a built-in wallet system to prevent fraudulent flags to avoid disrupting the one-click experience. Customers will be prompted to load their wallets with funds, which will then be distributed to a merchant’s virtual account number.
“We did not want to defeat our USP of one-click checkout by allowing consumers to try to checkout in one-click only for them to see their cards flagged as fraudulent,” Eze shared with TechCrunch. “Hence the reason why we had to build our system on a wallet system to enable that one-click checkout.”
OurPass also provides an additional incentive for its users by offering free deliveries on orders placed. The free orders are made possible due to partnerships with logistics companies MAX.ng and Gokada. Currently, merchants are charged a five percent commission rate, and 0.8 percent for each product sold. In the near future, the company plans to adopt a subscription-based model for revenue.
To scale, OnePass reportedly closed a $1 million pre-seed round led by Tekedia Capital and investors from Fortune 500 companies. With the funds, the company hopes to house 200 employees before the year ends which will propel the company’s transaction value.
