Hosted flow with QR hand-off
Your seller starts anywhere — desktop, tablet, in-app — and finishes the capture on their own phone camera. No app install, no webcam requirement, your branding throughout.
Marketplaces and gig platforms
Marketplace seller identity verification, built for scale
Know Your Seller for a two-sided platform: a hosted verification flow your sellers and gig workers complete on their own phone, a QR hand-off if they started on desktop, and a signed webhook the moment a result is in. Sandbox sessions are never billed, and the flow ships in English and French.
The problem
Trust has to scale with your supply side
A marketplace or gig platform grows its supply side fast, and every new seller or driver is a stranger until they aren't.
Sign-up is the moment you have the least leverage
A seller who hits friction at onboarding leaves for a competitor's app. A verification step has to be fast, mobile-first and not require a laptop, a webcam or a scheduled call.
Fake and stolen listings erode buyer trust
One bad actor selling under a stolen identity, or a driver account rented out to someone who isn't the verified person, costs you a lot more than the transaction it touched.
Support tickets do not scale
Asking a support agent to eyeball a photo of an ID emailed in by a seller does not hold up past a few hundred sign-ups a week, and it produces no record anyone can search later.
A worked example
A reseller signs up on a Friday night, from a desktop
Fictional, to show the shape of the flow. No real seller, platform or transaction is involved.
Seller sign-up
Marcus creates a seller account on a marketplace's desktop site and fills in his storefront details. The platform calls ShieldID to create a session and shows him a QR code on screen — no laptop webcam required.QR hand-off to the phone
Marcus scans the code with his phone. The same session opens on his phone's browser, already carrying the platform's branding, and the desktop page waits, showing a simple three-step instruction card.Capture, on his own phone camera
He photographs the front and back of his driver's license and completes a short guided liveness challenge — blink, turn, return to center. The barcode and the printed face are cross-checked; the live face is matched to the document portrait.Fraud signals run automatically
Anti-spoof, deepfake, mask and document tamper checks run on this session the same as every other one. Nothing here is a setting the platform has to remember to enable.The result, and the record
The desktop page updates the moment the phone finishes; a signed webhook tells the marketplace's backend the result is in, and Marcus's seller account activates. The verification is entered in the Activity Ledger and the ID images are purged automatically on a seven-day default timer.
What matters most at scale
Built for a supply side that grows every week
The capabilities that matter for a marketplace look different from a one-off compliance check: speed, mobile-first capture and reliability under volume.
Signed webhooks at scale
Every result is delivered by an HMAC-SHA256-signed callback, retried automatically if your endpoint is briefly unreachable, so a burst of sign-ups after a marketing push doesn't leave you polling for results.
Document verification
US driver's licenses and state IDs, read front and back, plus passports read from the machine-readable zone. Coverage spans all 50 states, the District of Columbia, five US territories and US State Department diplomatic IDs, 57 issuing jurisdictions in total, which matters when your supply side is spread across the country.
Face match and liveness
The account holder is matched to the ID they presented behind a guided liveness challenge, so a listing or a driver profile isn't quietly handed to someone else after the first verification.
Activity Ledger
An append-only record of who verified, when, and what the outcome was — the record you point to when a buyer or a rider asks whether a seller or driver was actually checked.
Watchlist screening
Sanctions and watchlist screening against major lists, including OFAC, is available as an account-level add-on for marketplaces whose category or geography calls for it.
Add-on
For disputes and audits
"Was this seller actually verified?" has an answer
A buyer disputes a purchase. A driver's account is flagged for suspicious activity. A payments partner asks for evidence of your Know Your Seller controls. The Activity Ledger is where you look first.
Append-only, enforced by the database
Entries can be added. They cannot be edited or deleted — not by your ops team, not by ShieldID. It is a property of the database, not a setting anyone could turn off.
One record per verification, searchable
Filter by actor, action, outcome or date to answer a specific dispute quickly instead of digging through a spreadsheet export from three teams ago.
Evidence for a platform-trust review
When a payments processor or an insurer asks how you screen sellers before they can list, the ledger is the artefact you hand over, not a policy document nobody has checked against reality.
Today the ledger records verified and failed verification outcomes, sign-ins and API-key activity, and audit exports. Per-view and per-download events for ID images, a dedicated decision event, purge receipts and a self-service CSV export for your team are coming soon.
Integration options
Drop into onboarding without slowing it down
Hosted verification page
Redirect a seller or driver to a branded ShieldID page at the point in your onboarding flow where you'd otherwise ask for an ID upload, and take the result back on your return URL.
QR hand-off
Desktop sign-up flows show a QR code; the applicant scans it and finishes capture on their phone camera, without you having to build camera access into your web app yourself.
One REST API, per-app keys
Create a session, read the result, or listen for the webhook. A separate key per app or environment keeps a sandbox integration and production traffic cleanly apart.
English and French
The verification flow and the portal are available in both languages, so a French-speaking seller or driver completes onboarding in French without a separate integration on your side.
Privacy notes
Your sellers' ID, handled the way you'd want your own to be
A platform that asks strangers for a government ID takes on a duty of care for it. Here's exactly what ShieldID does with it.
- Hosted on our own servers in Canada
- ID images, extracted fields and results are processed and stored on ShieldID's own servers in Canada, not a public cloud provider and not a US data center.
- Purged on a short timer
- ID images are purged automatically, seven days by default, configurable.
- Encrypted
- Date of birth is stored encrypted and ID images are encrypted at rest.
- Built with privacy by default
- Minimum collection, a short retention window and a searchable access record, so your own privacy notice to sellers is backed by something real, not aspirational.
Vs. the manual way
What changes when "email us a photo of your ID" goes away
A category comparison, not a claim about any specific vendor.
| Capability | ShieldID | Typical enterprise IDV | Manual checks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile-first capture with a QR hand-off from desktop | Yes | Sometimes | No |
| Liveness challenge, not just a photo upload | Yes | Usually | No |
| Signed webhooks with automatic retries | Yes | Usually | n/a |
| French flow, out of the box | Yes | Language switcher | Whatever staff happen to speak |
| Every verification searchable in an Activity Ledger | Yes | Not offered to the customer | A support ticket, if it's still open |
| Handles a sign-up spike without a support queue backing up | Yes | Usually | No |
| Sandbox that is never billed | Yes | Sometimes | n/a |
Objections
What a trust & safety lead asks before rolling this out
"Won't this add friction and hurt our sign-up conversion?"
The hosted flow is built for a phone camera and takes a few minutes once, not a scheduled video call. The QR hand-off means a desktop sign-up never has to switch devices manually or install anything.
"Can it handle a spike after a marketing push?"
Webhooks are signed and retried automatically if your endpoint is briefly unavailable, and sandbox testing lets you load-test your integration before a real spike arrives.
"We only care about identity, not a credit or background check."
That's exactly what ShieldID is built for — the identity layer, not a background-check bureau. Pair it with a background-check provider if your category needs one; ShieldID answers "is this a real person holding their own ID".
"Our supply side is bilingual — does this only work in English?"
No. The verification flow and the portal are available in English and French, so a French-speaking seller or driver completes the same flow in French.
What you see
Sellers verified at sign-up, on their own phone.
New sellers and workers verify in the sign-up flow. Your trust team sees what was read and how each check came out.
Questions
Straight answers for marketplaces and gig platforms.
Get started
Start in sandbox. Verify your first seller today.
Create a sandbox session, scan the QR code with your own phone, and see the webhook and the ledger entry it produces.
Sandbox sessions are never billed.