UK startup Cubate has launched Mosho, a mobile platform designed to help boutique retailers earn mCommerce revenues. The platform offers the retailer a mobile-optimised, transactional site, on which users can quickly and easily pay for goods via PayPal.

“In developing the platform, we looked at the success on mobile of Amazon and eBay, and put that down to the fact that the payment process is low friction, because they know who you are,” explains Cubate founder, Dave Erasmus, who previously founded and sold the SEO and paid search company, Broadplace.

Cubate has secured an agreement with PayPal, which enables it to act as an umbrella organisation under which the individual retailers play in the mobile channel. This means that retailers who sign up to the Cubate platform can enable PayPal payments with a persistent login for their customers, which lasts for up to a year, making the buying process quick and seamless. In the few weeks since the platform launched, 10 boutique retailers have signed up.

Cubate charges retailers a £1,000 set-up fee to build the mCommerce site, plus either a monthly fee of £95, or a percentage of sales made through the mobile channel, typically between 5 and 20 per cent.

Alongside Mosho, Cubate has also launched a mobile platform for the charity sector, Givey.co.uk. This platform runs in partnership with MissionFish, the organisation which administrates eBay’s charity initiative, eBay Giving Works.

Givey shares some similarities to Mosho, in that, through the relationship with MissionFish, donors are able to set up Gift Aid once, and then apply it to all donations made through the platform.

“Millions of pounds were donated through the DEC (Disasters Emergency Committee) to the Pakistan relief effort that was not gift-aided,” says Erasmus. “In fact, around £750m is lost every year because of an outdated system that disincentivises charities and the Treasury to make the most out of Gift Aid in the UK. This is a massive missed opportunity for charities; Givey aims to make the Gift Aiding process easier.”

Givey users create a giving profile that enables them to interact, engage and donate to any of their chosen charities that are signed up to MissionFish through almost any digital channel, including SMS, email, mobile, web, Facebook, and even Twitter, via a bot which crawls any users who have registered their Twitter handle on their Givey account. For charities, this means they can open up donations through channels that they might previously have considered too costly to implement.

Givey takes 1.25 per cent of the donation, eBay, 3.75 per cent, which makes 5 per cent in all, but as Erasmus notes, this is still the cheapest way to make micro donations digitally in the UK. “We really are not in this one for the money,” he says. “We are in it for the thought leadership.”