Background Remover for Shopify: Best Apps & Tools

The problem with traditional onboarding flows

Ever wonder why we still have to upload blurry photos of our passports just to open a simple bank account? It feels like we are living in 1998, yet here we are, still waiting three days for a human to click "approve" on a kyc check.

Traditional onboarding is basically a conversion killer. You spend all this money on ads, get a lead to your app, and then hit them with a massive wall of friction. (Unlocking Real Growth: Ditch ARR Caps for Customer Value) It's not just annoying; it's expensive for everyone involved.

• Manual document uploads are a mess: Users have to find their physical ID, take a photo that isn't blurry (good luck with that lighting), and wait. In a world of instant gratification, this feels like an eternity.
• High drop-off rates: According to a 2023 report by Signicat, 68% of consumers abandoned financial service applications—a record high caused by overly complex digital onboarding.
• Privacy paranoia: People are getting smart. They don't want to give your retail app a full scan of their drivers license just to get a loyalty discount. It's too much raw data for too little value.

For the engineering team, this isn't just a UX problem—it's an operational nightmare. You have to build integrations for ocr tools, handle edge cases for different regions, and manage a "manual review" queue that grows faster than your dev team.

"The global cost of kyc non-compliance and poor onboarding reached billions, but the lost revenue from abandoned signups is the hidden killer for b2b saas and fintech. (Inefficient KYC and Onboarding Processes are Losing Global Banks ...)"

If you're in healthcare, a slow flow means patients can't access records. In finance, it's lost trades. The data quality is often trash too, because ocr frequently misreads "8" as "B" in identity document processing, leading to corrupted records in your database.

We need a way to prove who we are without the "upload and pray" method. That brings us to how verifiable credentials actually flip this whole model on its head.

What are Verifiable Credentials anyway?

Think of a verifiable credential (vc) like the physical plastic card in your wallet, but actually smart and impossible to fake. Instead of a database entry sitting on some company's server, it's a digital packet of data that you own, carry in a digital wallet app, and share only when you feel like it.

To make this work, every vc is linked to a did (Decentralized Identifier). Think of a did as a permanent, digital "address" or identifier that anchors the credential to you without needing a central registry like a phone company or social media giant to vouch for it.

To get how this works, you gotta look at the "Trust Triangle"—which is actually more like a square once you add the tech layer. It’s a setup between four components that removes the need for a middleman to be online 24/7.

• The Issuer: This is the source of truth, like a government office or a hospital. They sign a piece of data with their private key and hand it to you.
• The Holder: That’s the user. You store the vc in your wallet. You aren't just a row in a database; you're the literal custodian of the record.
• The Verifier: This is the app or service (like a bank or a pharmacy) that needs to check your info. They don't call the issuer; they just check the cryptographic signature on the vc you presented.
• The Verifiable Data Registry: This is the "secret sauce" layer (usually a blockchain or distributed ledger). It’s where the issuer’s public keys and did documents are stored. The verifier looks here to find the public key they need to prove the signature is legit.

Most of us are used to oidc or saml where a "Login with Google" button does the heavy lifting. But that's a hub-and-spoke model; if the central provider goes down or decides to ban you, you're locked out of everything.

vcs are different because they're decentralized. There is no central point of failure in the protocol itself. When you show a credential to a retail app to prove you're over 21, the app doesn't ping the issuer directly. It just validates the math. This is huge for privacy too. Using "selective disclosure"—which is powered by tech like Zero-Knowledge Proofs (zkp) or SD-JWTs—you can prove you are over 21 without revealing your exact birth date or home address.

According to the W3C Verifiable Credentials Data Model, these credentials are designed to be machine-readable and tamper-evident, which is a massive step up from a grainy jpeg of a passport.

This tech is already hitting the real world. In healthcare, doctors use vcs to prove their credentials across different hospital systems instantly. In finance, it means passing a kyc check once and reusing that "proof" at five different banks without re-uploading a single doc.

Making onboarding instant with VCs

Imagine if signing up for a new bank account was as fast as tapping your phone to pay for a coffee. No more digging through a junk drawer for a passport or waiting for some guy in an operations center to squint at your utility bill.

With verifiable credentials, we're moving from "fill out this 20-field form" to a simple cryptographic handshake. It’s basically the end of the "copy-paste" era of identity.

• The QR Code Handshake: Instead of typing your name, address, and ssn, you just scan a qr code. Your digital wallet pops up, asks if you want to share specific info with the app, and boom—you’re in.
• Zero Manual Entry: Since the data comes directly from a signed vc (like one issued by a government or a previous kyc check), there's no ocr errors or typos. The data is 100% clean the moment it hits your database.
• Instant Validation: Your backend doesn't need to call a third-party verification service and wait 30 seconds. It just validates the digital signature against a public ledger or registry. It's math, so it's nearly instantaneous.

Let’s say you’re building a car-sharing app. Normally, you’d make the user upload their driver's license, then you'd pay a service to verify it. With vcs, the user just shares a "Driving Eligibility" credential. In retail, a high-end liquor store app could verify a user is over 21 without ever seeing their actual birth date or home address. This is a huge win for privacy-conscious users who are tired of oversharing.

A 2024 report by Gartner predicts that by 2026, at least 500 million people will be using digital identity wallets regularly.

Most of us aren't starting from scratch; we have legacy databases and complex ciam setups. This is where a tool like SSOJet comes in handy for engineers. It acts as the glue between these new-school vcs and your traditional oidc or saml flows. Instead of rewriting your entire auth stack, you use a gateway to translate vc "claims" into something your app understands. It helps you scale without the headache of managing raw cryptographic keys for every single user.

But even with the right glue, the actual architecture of the digital wallet brings its own set of technical hurdles you'll need to jump.

Technical hurdles and how to jump them

Look, I'm not gonna lie—moving to verifiable credentials isn't just flipping a switch. You’re gonna run into some annoying technical debt and "how do we actually do this" moments, especially when it comes to making different systems talk to each other.

The biggest wall you’ll hit is that not every digital wallet uses the same "language." Even with the w3c standards we talked about earlier, different vendors use different did methods.

• Standardization lag: Some wallets use did:key while others prefer did:ion. You need a mediation layer or a universal resolver so your app doesn't break when a user brings a wallet you didn't specifically build for.
• The Cross-Border problem: If you’re a fintech in the EU, you have to care about eIDAS 2.0. If you're in the US, it's a different story. Your verification logic needs to be flexible enough to accept different "trust anchors" depending on where the user is from.
• Legacy bridge: Most of your internal apps probably still expect a jwt or a saml assertion. You’ll likely need to implement a "Credential Verifier" that sits at the edge, checks the vc, and then issues a standard oidc token for your downstream microservices.

This is the part that keeps it teams up at night. Since there’s no "forgot password" button in a truly decentralized world, you need a backup plan that doesn't suck.

We have to acknowledge a bit of a trade-off here: while the protocol itself is decentralized, making it work for normal humans usually means using hybrid-centralized solutions for a better ux.

• Social Recovery: Some wallets let users designate "guardians" (trusted friends or other devices) to help recover a lost key without a central authority holding the master password.
• Cloud-Encrypted Backups: Many providers now offer encrypted shards of the private key stored in iCloud or Google Drive. This technically reintroduces a central point of failure, but for a retail app, it’s a fair trade-off so you don't lose customers who lose their phones.
• Rotation and Revocation: If a phone is stolen, the issuer needs a way to revoke that specific vc. To keep things private, verifiers don't "ping" the issuer directly. Instead, they check "Revocation Lists" or "Status Lists" hosted on the public registry. You should check out the OpenID for Verifiable Presentations spec which helps handle these real-time status checks without leaking user metadata back to the issuer.

At the end of the day, vcs are about giving control back to the user while making our lives as devs easier by providing clean, pre-verified data. It’s a bit of a shift in how we think about "owning" identity, but once you get the plumbing right, you'll never want to go back to manual ocr again.