Mobile Payments Platform ZooZ Partners With MobiCart, Ready To Raise Series A

ZooZ, an in-app mobile payment system that supports credit cards, PayPal and carrier billing, just made a move that will introduce its service to 10,000 different merchants. The company is partnering with MobiCart, a platform that allows anyone to create m-commerce applications on iOS and Android. MobiCart already supports around 40 different shopping carts within its mobile storefronts, and is now adding ZooZ to the lineup.

In addition, ZooZ CEO Oren Levy says the company is planning to come to the U.S. and is preparing to raise its Series A.

Levy says that ZooZ will be splitting its operation, currently based in Israel, and will relocate some of its 10-person staff to the U.S. The location – even West Coast or East Coast – has not yet been decided, but he will be out here next month scouting for office space (and likely, talking with investors).

While the name doesn’t necessarily imply trust and security (“ZooZ” sounds like some virtual reward you would collect in a mobile game. “Beat the boss to earn 10 ZooZ”), the mobile payments service is actually trying to bring the same level of security to mobile that exists in the world of the desktop-based web.

“Despite the fact that there’s a lot of m-commerce going on, there’s a lack of uniformity in checkout schemes,” explains Levy. “Each app creates it own checkout, its own colors and you don’t know how secure it is.” On the desktop, you’ll see things like the VeriSign seal that assures shoppers that the checkout process is verified to be safe. This doesn’t exist on mobile. Not coincidentally, ZooZ’s CTO and co-founder Ronen Morecki is ex-VeriSign (he was a VP of R&D over there) and knows a thing or two about security and fraud detection.

The problem with the lack of security means users aren’t converting and there’s a high cart abandonment rate. So ZooZ introduced an in-app SDK that developers can implement with three lines of code in order to start accepting payments within their app. A seal at the bottom of the checkout tells mobile shoppers that the process is secure. The SDK also helps developers who don’t want to establish their own merchant accounts in order to accept credit cards, and just want a drop-in toolkit for doing that. The SDK currently supports iOS, Android, and more recently, HTML5. Plans to extend the payment options (now carrier billing, cc’s, and PayPal) to Amazon and Google Wallet are also in the works. And, as you may expect, ZooZ makes its money through transaction fees (2.8% + $0.19 for each successful transaction).

Since ZooZ’s launch in March, over 1,500 developers have signed up, about 50% of which are on iOS and the other half on Android. Assuming ZooZ can raise the necessary funding, the plan is to connect the platform with as many different types of e-wallets/payment options as possible, and make the SDK smartly location-based. That is, it would detect where users are physically located to show them only the payment options supported in their region.

More info on ZooZ and developer downloads are here.