E-commerce will evolve next month as Amazon loses the 1-Click patent
thirtybees.com
thirtybees.com
> the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has started writing a draft proposal for one click buying methods.
The W3C site itself has a number of web payment related proposals in progress[1]. The Payment Request API, in particular, looks pretty interesting (updated 2017-08-17). I wonder what a difference something like that would've made back in the day when I was bathed in Paypal SOAP.
> the patent will expire and the technology behind it will be free to be used by any e-commerce site
particularly specious. There is no "technology" behind it. It was a concept or busines process that the vaguaries of patent law deemed worthy of rewarding.
Not to mention that any technology ("source code") Amazon used to implement the patent will remain under copyright essentially indefinitely.
Or are you saying nobody else can implement "1 click" even after the patent expires... because of copyright?
Edit: Was an honest question, I've upvoted all the answers as I found them interesting, not understanding the barrage of downvotes shrug
The one-click patent has an implementation, but the implementation is so trivial that there are only two things you can do with it: either copy it wholesale, or write your own based on the same idea (which will have nothing in common with the original because they're both too small to "share DNA" like that.) In this case, you can't copy wholesale, because copyright. So you're stuck writing from scratch. At that point, the patent has given you no advantage in implementation over the simple knowledge that a process for doing X exists at all.
This is a good way of describing the point of patents, thanks :-)
Many patents don't reward the first person who solves a given problem, so much as they reward the first person to encounter a given problem. That person adopts a trivial, obvious solution and the USPTO cheerfully rubber-stamps it at everyone else's expense. This was clearly one of those patents. It cost Amazon essentially nothing to research, nothing to develop, and nothing to implement, but the rewards were immense.
This depends on whether you consider X to be "converting ecommerce sales" or "ordering items with a single click". Just because the implementation is easy to reverse engineer from a one line description of the novelty doesn't diminish the resources spent by Amazon in coming up with this insight and testing how it improved their business.
I'm not strongly in favour of software patents in general, but the argument that this patent is "too easy to copy" misses the point a bit.
The same failure of understanding that caused the author of that blog post to misidentify Amazon's one click patent as being related to a "technology" rather than just an idea is also behind the patent office's troubling tendency to issue patents to other ideas. Advocates for patent reform make a convincing case that issuing patent protection to ideas like this actually harms innovation more than it fosters it.
The fact that the actual implementation (technology) of the one click shopping idea, the source code, is protected by copyright is true but isn't particularly relevant. And to answer your second question, copyright prevents anyone from using Amazon's particular one-click source code, but that's largely irrelevant, since it's an idea that can be implemented a million ways, which is a major reason that many people feel it shouldn't be eligible for patent protection.
Edit: I see that Animats has covered this much better elsewhere in the thread.
Maybe, but this is not why we have patents. Patents justification is to help innovations to spread, by making them public and, in exchange, granting a monopoly for some time as would have been the case should the innovation been kept secret.
Patents are not, in theory, a bonus for whoever implement something first.
In practice though, this seems to be largely the case, at least in software, that patents are like those mine field maps during the gold rushes, partitioning the hills and delimiting every tiny area belonging to one miner, probably to police what would otherwise be a violent, perpetual quarrel.
Yeah, and? I wasn't saying so.
All this feature actually does it give you the users credit card, phone number, and billing/shipping addresses. You still have to give that information to someone like Stripe.
They're focusing on mobile since that is where the checkout experience is the most painful. https://ride.lyft.com has it implemented if you want to check it out.
Apple has not implemented the starndard yet, the WebKit Status page lists it as "Under Consideration".
I hope they end up implementing it for the sites hat won't do Apple Pay natively.
I used to sit on the working group for Payment Request - the primary intention of Payment Request is to get rid of checkout forms and parallel implementations of the same logic. Right now most for most implementations that means credit card entry, but the standard is designed to support any type of payment.
So if I'm running an eCommerce site and want to support PayPal, Apple Pay, and Android Pay I shouldn't need to implement three discrete SDKs and APIs - I can instead implement Payment Request (although you'll still need to process the payment information output by each of those payment mechanisms separately. Ultimately for many merchants the implementation of Payment Request will be abstracted away by their payment processor, such as Stripe).
However, there is a parallel standard to Payment Request, called Payment Handler, which is designed to allow third party payment providers to write service-worker-esque plugins to browsers to take payment directly. They're intended to work together, but it's possible for a browser to implement just Payment Request to replace autofill if they so choose.
There's also a lot of other work going on at the W3C around payment, but Payment Request and Payment Handler have the most support from browser vendors and are as such the most actively developed.
If you open a website that requests your Visa or MasterCard CC data in any Tencent product, it will be blocked unless "their special hack proof API" is used. And yes, they blocked apple pay too
Alibaba are very active participants on the Payment Request Working Group. I'm not sure they can undercut themselves. You will find several very large Chinese companies taking part: https://www.w3.org/2004/01/pp-impl/83744/status
Paypal later banned Alibaba from using Paypal outside of China
Please to god W3C, take 402 and make it part of that standard! I so wish for us all to be able to respond 402 and have a simple standard way to charge.
However, there's a proposed server/HTTP specification that does include it. It lacks the same broad support that Payment Request has, so is still in quite an early stage of development - https://www.w3.org/TR/webpayments-http-api/
[1]: https://docs.taler.net/merchant/frontend/python/html/tutoria...
> madnessAmazon's real innovation was combining one-click ordering with easy order cancellation for a few minutes after the order. This makes enabling one-click ordering low-risk. Many on-line sales operations still don't get this, as I mentioned the last time this came up on HN. Most shopping cart programs have a built-in attitude of "We have your money now, muhaaa haaa". Yes, you can "contact customer service to cancel." ("Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed... Due to unusually high call volume...")
Now the people who don't get this will implement one-click ordering without easy cancellation and anger their customers.
> obvious in advance, not obvious in hindsightThe speed of delivery, prime benefits, brand recognition, and willingness to lose money on many if not most items are absolutely brutal to compete against.
I'm glad one click checkout will be more broadly available, but it's probably not going to make much of a difference...
If you've been to a Costco recently you may be surprised to find that they're much less expensive than Amazon. They have more buying power and stronger vendor relationships that AMZN simply doesn't have. Prime Day 2017 was also a huge disappointment (Mostly overpriced junk like bluetooth speakers).
Honestly I think the only thing that works in Amazon's favor is the convenience, and their private distribution/delivery network. Beyond that they're nothing more than a generic online marketplace.
The Walmart of the Internet, I suppose.
FWIW I usually try to find more direct sources before buying on Amazon. If the other source can drop a few bucks off the Amazon price and offer free shipping I'll buy it direct from them.
Amazon Prime's fees are quite small compared to direct shipping costs with carriers. It depends on the product type, of course, but typically third-party sellers are already on thin margins selling on Amazon. It's very likely that "drop a few bucks off the Amazon price and offer free shipping" means they're selling to you at a loss.
I'm not saying it's a great deal for the company, but what can you expect consumers to do if Amazon has the cheapest price AND prime shipping you already paid for?
That said some companies at least raise their prices on purpose when posting to Amazon in order to meet their standards for things like returns and Prime shipping.
If Amazon would let me pick a slow option that was still UPS/Fedex, I'd do it. Same with other sites, sometimes I won't buy from them if they only ship USPS and I know it won't fit in the box.
For me, Prime is great because it means most thing come to my door at no extra (other than the yearly fee) cost.
I realize Target and Kroger probably implement the same tactics as WM now, same with eBay/Newegg sellers and Amazon, so I realize it's more symbolic than anything.
I am not from US but currently studying here and haven't thought much about this topic. Walmart, Walgreen and Amazon feel too convenient. I would love to learn more on the topic before it becomes a habit.
- Extremely aggressive about interrupting unionization attempts.
- Relatively low pay, particularly for the bottom 1/2 of employees.
- They squeeze suppliers to restrain prices to the benefit of consumers. This essentially adds another aggrieved voice in the crowd.
- Then there's a very broad, vague, low value argument about the soul of communities being destroyed by their presence. This premise was particularly common ~15 years ago. It has turned out to be almost entirely bunk, so it's an argument rarely used against them today. Today, the focus is overwhelmingly on pay, specifically that their low wages force tax payers to subsidize said wages.
Most of these arguments collapse upon rational inspection. For example, they universally pay better than mom & pop local stores and employ far more people in small & mid size towns / communities. Then the argument gets flipped: it then gets said that they intentionally pay higher than local competitors, and advocate in favor of higher minimum wage laws, to crush local competition (ie damned if they do, damned if they don't).
The same people that dislike Walmart, you'll find, will frequently lodge 'for the common good' arguments economically. Walmart acts for the good of the many, as they squeeze supplier margins to hold prices down. Somehow saving 200 million people money is turned against them as a negative.
Their low pay is an interesting issue unto itself. Their margins are hyper low, at 2.5% net income margins; their sales have been flat and profits have been falling for years. If they pay each employee just another $4,000 to $5,000 per year, they'd go bankrupt (particularly as they begin the long hard war with Amazon). They're often contrasted with Costco, which pays meaningfully higher wages; however Costco manages that by employing far fewer people per dollar of sales. To match Costco on that, Walmart would have to fire at least half a million people, most of whom have few skills to do any other higher paying jobs.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the low pay / tax payer subsidy issue, is who the tax payers are that are doing the subsidizing: mostly the rich. The top 1/3 in America pay almost all the income taxes that go toward subsidizing Walmart's bottom 1/2 of employees who earn low wages. This almost never gets discussed when the topic comes up, in fact it's aggressively dodged. The people doing the arguing, are overwhelmingly in favor of the rich subsidizing the poor, but for some reason it's not ok when it comes to this (ie they're actually arguing it's bad that the rich tax payers subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, it's comical). This is just a baseless attack on Walmart, because of what they are. The only alternative to having the top 1/3 subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, is to have those employees lose their jobs and then the subsidy goes to 100% instead of being partial as it is today.
> Critics, as well as the United States Internal Revenue Service, charge that the company was trying to profit from the deaths of its employees, and take advantage of the tax law which allowed it to deduct the premiums.
The process goes like this, someone recommends a book in HN, they provide an Amazon link, I read a couple of reviews, at this point I'm convinced about buying the book or not, or even if I'm not totally convinced, the price, and the easiness of just one click makes me do it. That process has increased the amount of books I read per year. Sure the button is only a small part of that, but I think is an esencial part, I think Walmart can get a lot of benefit from this.
It's much easier to buy books when you don't need to wait for delivery, unpack, carry around, get up to get them, etc. But your process already consist of several clicks and waiting for many pages.
Isn't it well-documented that the more steps you have during th purchase process, the lower your conversion rates? I'm sure this is especially true at Amazon's scale.
To be specific though, if I'm on my phone and I see a confirmation window, I might postpone the purchase until I'm in front of my computer - and by then I might forget about it. One click purchase completely bypasses these types of scenarios.
Maybe some epub sellers could email it to your kindle with 1-click purchasing now?
What I'm hopeful of is that (barring evil patents or monopolies) all of those things should be able to be outsourced a third party vendor or service. Hopefully in the future you will be able to simply contract out alternative delivery service, or drone delivery, or "prime"-like membership programs with the click of a button or an API call.
Amazon have a lot but are a long way off having everything. Health and Beauty for example, they may have the top 50k sales ranks pretty well covered but at least the top 100k are probably worth a middle mans time.
A tip: if you ever find yourself saying "why does a company have X feature/product, I don't use it, no one uses it!" you might be right on the first statement but you're almost certainly wrong on the second.
It wouldn't be there if no one used it.
Every step between a customer and completing an order is a loss of sales.
Then there has to be some sort of measurement out there on how each step causes cart abandonment (or whatever it's called).
Its the same reason sites add Single-Sign-On... click click, I'm on a website... vs filling out forms, verification, etc...
Apparently Amazon finds that adding 1-click does more good than harm.
You just want a native advertisement and Top 10 lists.
If we could rerun the timeline without this patent, then the e-commerce field would likely not be so lopsided.
If the one-click patent was a major inhibitor of competition, I'd basically expect to see a lot of two-click check out options. Instead I find myself creating a million redundant user accounts, telling people that my mothers maidenname is "khhsyebg" (she's got some Dothraki blood, it seems) and parsing "don't not uncheck the box if you wish to prevent us from causing the absence of non-delivery of our newsletter and also not abstaining from passing on your details to third parties".
Ahaha, you are so damn right!!
Certianly in the UK the friction of buying from "non-Amazon" websites exists ( create an account, enter payment etc ) but Amazon just uses the same delivery networks as everyone else.
In fact a small company often dispatches faster in my experience than Amazon; for non-Prime at least they've been stretching the 'Dispatching Soon' timelines to nearly a week[0]. Of course once it's in that status you can't cancel the order.
[0] As a third-party seller through Amazon I am required to dispatch within two working days. One rule for them and another for the little folk.
But yes, a lot of small vendors do ship very quickly. They do still generally require me to create an account and unsubscribe from their newsletter, regardless of unticking the box during signup.
The US Amazon checkout shows an estimated delivery date for Prime items that includes processing time and is >95% reliable in my experience.
My non-Prime sold-by-Amazon in-stock orders from Amazon US consistently take 3-6 business days to process but they still arrive by the estimated date (so it is fine by me). If I pay for faster shipping they ship on the day I order.
Maybe at different points along the chain, but in terms of the last mile, my Amazon purchases seem to be mostly delivered by "Amazon Logistics"
Definitely not true in the US. They've coerced USPS to deliver on Sundays and have their own courier service. Internally their ability to get items to the couriers is much faster than almost every single business out there.
Most companies don't even have that checkbox anymore, the amount of accounts I've had to make that lead to more emails demanding my attention is shocking
I have actually never seen the famous one click checkout despite being a frequent Amazon customer. Could it perhaps be illegal in Europe? Not sure what else would explain this.
At least here in .de, there's plenty of other online retailers which are just as fast, or at least almost, and while the checkout sometimes has a step or two more than amazon, it's rarely that bad.
Last week I ordered something at 10:45pm, it arrived the next morning at 9am.
I'd imagine that's very difficult for other companies to compete with.
I particularly liked this: http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly//news/amazon_patent...
Does anyone know what happened with Bezos' proposal for "fast patents"?
Other ecommerce sites frequently have so many additional/hidden charges that I would never want to click "buy" right from the item page. I abandon so many carts when I get to the checkout page because there's $20 in shipping charges on a $8 item, or they've tacked on a $5 handling fee, or they wait until the very end of the process to tell you that the item will ship in 8 weeks.
In my experience the price shown and delivery time estimate is always accurate, and as a Prime customer the delivery fee is included in your subscription
it's probably because I don't use 1-click that often, because it is rarely 1-click, which leads to me not using it very often
(I use normal buying constantly though)
Just because it is easy to return things doesn't make me feel good about doing it - it is such a waste. Maybe I should look at it as creating jobs.
I've never used it for other things though, even as a Prime customer.
My main issue with it is I use different delivery addresses, sometimes to work, sometimes to an Amazon Locker, rarely to home as I'm never in.
Some days I feel Amazon was not only the world's largest non-profit organization but also among its most beneficent!
On the plus side, most sites I'd be really worried about probably don't have my checkout information anyway.
By the end of it, everything was so generically described that I couldn't even recognize it anymore. This entire system needs to be reworked or thrown away entirely.
"years of research and brilliant ideas should be protected"
can never adequately define what must be patented and what must not be. An brilliant idea need not take years of research. Even the interpretation of the word brilliant is debatable.
PS: I'm not taking any stance with respect to patents. Just saying that it's not black and white.
Then no one would use mesh networks instead of almost no one!
In my mind patents were made to protect inventors and the little guy so that he/she could capitalize on their invention before the market is unleashed. When multi-billion dollar companies are gaining government sanctioned exclusivity to something through a patent, something seems off.
But in this example they weren't a multi-billion dollar company 20 years ago.
I agree. Patent laws have created for moral reasons instead of practical ones. Let this be a lesson to lawmakers to pass regulation based on facts instead of feelings.
So, in your world, why would a medical research lab spend billions researching and developing new drugs, spend years going through regulatory approval and testing, only to have their drug be sold for pennies as a generic?
I also don't see the huge advantage of this. I never use one-click checkout on Amazon. I like to review everything before I buy.
I guess for totally impulse purchases it helps eliminate a step at which the buyer might reconsider a purchase. But I don't like to shop that way.
AFAIK (I only ever used one-click checkout on amazon.co.jp) there's a 15-minute or so window where you can review and modify/cancel your order, so the step is still there (though most people would probably ignore it). I found it convenient to use because domestic shipping was free, and I'm already seeing the price of the product, which is the only thing I'm buying, so there's nothing else to review.
It is good UI design:
Optimize the common flow (buy the item) and provide easy undo (from the post-purchase confirmation page, and in the delay before shipping).
But I've still only used it a couple of times - the psychological barrier, wanting to include an add-on item, etc.
So maybe it really was a nontrivial invention for its time.
Not quite. They apply the same approach even when delivery is instant; you can order a kindle book, download it, and cancel the order.
http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4808:d4r...
You could enforce it with additional restrictions, like color / size / font / layout, but the text "1-click" can freely be used to describe processes that require 1 click.
Oh hell no! Just what we need, yet another reason for people to attack your browser. Don't we already suggest to never use the "remember your password" button? Now, it's "remember your credit card." No. Please, just no.
The "remember your password" functionality is awful if your threat model is "I don't want my passwords to be stolen", but it's terrific if your threat model includes "I don't want to be phished".
Perhaps there is a chance now for SC (and others) to use this? (It'd be interesting to see how often the patent thwarted any business decisions. Also, I wonder if this was considering in the funding round...)
Here is the comment: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14991938
Here is the parent HN post: > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14990911
Simply from a legal standpoint this is BS. In some countries you have to display the customer a whole bunch of information and terms before he can make the purchase.
Just because Amazon ignores this due to their size and $$$ doesn't mean everyone can.
I have never used the "buy now" feature, so honestly I think it's impact is a bit overblown.
Here are my reasons I never use it:
1) I do a lot of comparison shopping, so I like to review my orders before the final purchase. (in case I put something in my cart and then later added something better)
2) I want to make sure I don't order something under $35 and get stuck paying for expedited shipping (which is free for prime members over $35 in purchases)
3) I have a few addresses and cards on file, and want to make sure the order will use the right one.
4) I use the cart as a temporary list, anything that looks interesting during my shopping session gets thrown in there (or perhaps another browser window if doing comparisons).
5) I use my cart as a queue of things to buy that I don't need "right now". I'll let things pile up in there until I do need something. I think it is a waste of fuel, boxes, etc. to place an order every day of the week instead of one box a week.
If this gets any traction I will need to fight even harder to opt out.
I yearn for the day I can have one off transaction codes.
If you as a retailer have your checkout page set up properly, the actual card data never hits your server.
But if I only supplied a token. with a value I determined I would not have to worry.
You mean the username and password for the site you've logged on to? ;-)
A temporary card number can be configured with a fixed value you specify; most banks provide the service for free.
You can also buy a Visa or AmEx gift card, and use that.
Most of the major sites do store cards information and they go through the annoying PCI DSS compliance to be allowed to do just that.
The extra $16k of float that Stripe requires is not worth it for me. This is why we have credit card numbers come to our server.
We're working to speed this up for other countries!
For debit cards, the dispute process is called Reg E and the consumer is out the money for a month or more until decided in their favor. So there's risk in storing a debit card number.
- not 100% true- see "fraud Liability Shift topics" Your card Issuer gets it if it's an EMV (ie chip was dipped) card-present transaction, merchant gets the liability if it was online or over the phone-Exception being if 3DS is used. Fraud is ultimately payed for either by your bank or by the merchant.
I hardly ever use cash anymore so my bank statements have a lot of action going on.
How closely do you monitor those?
It doesn't truly benefit you, hurts the merchant, increases prices for everyone.
People love zero liability so that's where we are and we all have to pay for it.
We have those (at least in America), and have for many years. Services like "ShopSafe".
They also create many hassles and headaches. Can make returns difficult, validation difficult (please show the card used, what, it's a virtual card?), and the rigor may not be great (reoccurring charges on "invalidated" numbers, etc).
I have never seen a service like that - so (I think) it is mainly on your side of the pond.
edit: for clarification, yes for in store, my card is the same card and I cant easily generate a new number to swipe at a POS, but online & via app I manage 1-time payments (generated card number shuts off after successful charge) or 'Merchant Locked' card numbers that will only work at that merchant and which I can shut off any time.
With this i'm much more comfortable giving out my CC to a shady/basic website if i'm concerned. (ie buying mulch from the company's barebones website)
The right product at the right price, fast. That's what matters.
Note The more common term is credit card Tokenization, not just Vaulting, and is not required for 1-click if the merchant is retaining CC numbers. - although this is not recommended due to PCI and breach liability.
They have a patent on the RESULT of technology. The patent SHOULD be on THEIR VERY SPECIFIC IMPLEMENTATION of 1-click checkout, but instead it is on all implementations that result in 1-click checkout.
Patents really are not meant for the internet...
Businesses are the customers you want.
Make a Magento integration that allow ecommerce sites to implement it?
This is factually incorrect. Of course, there are executives at Amazon and Apple who know how much was paid to license the one-click patent.