• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 8, 2014

Engineers at Two Tap have developed an automated universal shopping cart that works with any product or application online, similar to Facebook's and Twitter's commerce "buy" buttons allowing consumers to make purchases from feeds and advertisements on their respective sites.

The Y Combinator-backed startup also raised a $2.7 million seed round supported by Khosla Ventures, Silicon Valley Angel, Green Visor Capital, Ryan Petersen, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and Posterous co-founder Gary Tan, along with We Funder, Transmedia Capital and Digital Garage.

"We believe entering data in checkout forms should become obsolete in 2014," said Two Tap CEO Razvan Roman. "There's so much great technology, but for some reason it doesn't exist in the ecommerce space."

Roman expects the technology will replace checkout forms as they become obsolete. This building block could lead to technology that allows consumers more often to make a purchase with a fingerprint. Consumers will use voice search to find a product and their fingerprint to make the purchase.

The funds will help Two Tap's developers build out services around its API that integrates an ecommerce shopping cart or Buy button in any app or on any Web site. The code allows consumers to make purchases without repeatedly entering their credit card information. It stores the shipping and billing information and passes it to the ecommerce site like American Apparel, Best Buy, Macy's among others, so consumers make purchases in two taps on any participating Web site or application without requiring the retailer to make technical integrations.

Photos on Pinterest -- while not a client today -- could use the buy button to act as a pass through to any one of the major 215 retailers that participate in Two Tap's program. Although starting from practically nothing, it's important to note the company has seen about 50-times growth in monthly transactions during the past six months

The API does not store credit or debit card CVC codes, the three- or four-digit security number. While technically hackers cannot commit fraud if they do not have this code used to confirm purchases, skeptics and security experts would argue that sophisticated software programs can easily run through three- or four-digit numbers to find the matching code. As an added safeguard, retailers process each order through their individual payment system to add one more layer of anti-fraud security. 

Two Tap engineers follow what Roman calls PCI DSS-level security compliance, noting that it's the most sophisticated security regulations and protocols available today. 

Twitter begun testing a "Buy" button in its timeline and expanded tweet views in the mobile app, similar to Facebook's, which allows site visitors to make purchases through advertisements or other posts in their news feeds. Facebook recently acquired Internet security firm PrivateCore to build out the social network into an ecommerce marketplace. PrivateCore's technology, vCage, aims to help protect servers from malware, unauthorized physical access, and malicious hardware devices, making it safer to run outsourced applications in the cloud.

"Buy Button" photo from Shutterstock.