Since the early days of the dot-com era, people have been buying more stuff — from pet food to diapers — on the Internet. The process was straightforward: Fire up your web browser, fill out your shipping and payment information, and receive your products in a week or two.
Then came a major headache for retailers. The smartphone, with its lack of a keyboard and a smaller screen than a personal computer, made it tougher for people to buy things quickly and easily from their handsets.
Now, Stripe, an e-commerce company based in San Francisco, is trying to make it easier for people to buy from their phones. On Monday, the start-up announced a new product called Relay, which is essentially a set of software tools that let retailers sell goods more easily across apps and social networks while making the checkout process simpler for consumers.
“Figuring out how to deliver the right commerce experience is becoming increasingly relevant in delivering the right overall experience,” Patrick Collison, Stripe’s co-founder and chief executive, said at an event in San Francisco.
A retailer like Warby Parker, the eyeglass company, for example, could use the new Stripe software to integrate itself with any number of partner websites that use Stripe as a method for processing payments. Warby Parker can post a pair of glasses for sale on Twitter, which has partnered with Stripe, and a Twitter user could buy that pair of glasses within the app using only a few taps, instead of linking to an outside website with a longer registration process.
“Consumers are interacting with our brand across mobile and across so many other places,” said Chris Maliwat, head of product management at Warby Parker. It’s much easier, Mr. Maliwat said, to use Stripe’s software, which works with many shopping apps like Spring or ShopStyle.
From PayPal and Facebook to smaller start-ups like Shopify, many companies have long tried to make buying things from your phone much easier. PayPal’s Braintree unit offers simplified purchasing tools for apps, and Facebook has tested a feature with some retailers that automatically fills out your payment information on partner websites.
Some of the early efforts at e-commerce from some of the major social networks like Facebook and Twitter have not been rousing successes. Facebook killed off a service in which it sold items directly to the public, and Twitter’s early test partnerships with companies like TheFancy, an online shopping company, have not been rolled out widely.
Pinterest, the social scrapbooking site, recently announced a partnership with Stripe and PayPal to let customers buy items on Pinterest, though it is too early to gauge how well it has performed.
Stripe wants to jump-start the world of mobile buying by enticing big retailers like Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue to use its tools for selling across services like Twitter and other consumer apps, places where the company believes more people are turning to buy things online.
Nathan Hubbard, Twitter’s head of commerce, said that more than 50 million people tweet some signal of intent — “I want, I need” — on the service every month. With the Stripe integration, the company hopes more of those people will do that buying from inside Twitter itself.
Stripe is also working with advertising networks like InMobi, which serves ads inside thousands of mobile applications, to make it easier to buy things from inside ads themselves.
“We’re not claiming to do anything magical here,” John Collison, Patrick Collison’s brother and a co-founder of Stripe, said in an interview. “This is how it should be in the first place.”