Bolt launches an Amazon-like checkout experience for the rest of online retail | Hacker News Reader

Bolt launches an Amazon-like checkout experience for the rest of online retail

techcrunch.com

36 pointsSujan28 comments

> It does things like track where the mouse is moving on the page, whether someone is copying and pasting information into the fields, whether they’re making typos, how fast they’re typing, and many other factors. By analyzing customer behavioral patterns, Bolt says it has a better shot at stopping fraud than just asking for the billing address.

Smells like bullshit, how is any of this meant to distinguish a mildly sophisticated fraudster from browser autofill?

Smells like machine learning to me...

Yes, absolutely.

Also, there are companies that already do this, such as Iovation: https://www.iovation.com/

CEO of Bolt here. Browser autofill is a very detectable pattern, amongst hundreds of other patterns that all become elements of a broader fraud model. This broader fraud model doesn't only incorporate behavioral features, but literally hundreds of other features around order details, personal details, shipping info.

May smell like BS (a lot of companies in this space are full of BS). But, we spent 3 years building a world-class data ingestion & ML engine which we'll describe more in future blog posts. And our case studies (https://bolt.com/case-studies) with more to come demonstrate the type of results we're able to achieve.

How do you handle browsers with javascript turned off? This invasion of privacy is exactly why it's turned off.

Thats a super edge case tbh.

Honest question - do many modern checkouts work with JS turned off? Purely assuming here, but I would have thought that most checkouts are baked into web apps anyway these days, with the exception of some small vendors?

Why would they try to cater to the .001% that turn off javascript?

Because their tracking of mouse movements and timings will get them on the list of any self respecting tracking blocker. Then the basic html version will be necessary for a much bigger audience.

What's interesting to me is having an 'authority' in this space that people might trust. I can't tell you how much pain it was to work on some one-off ecommerce projects and have clients want to customize every stupid damn little thing. Arguing about font size, form fields, making stupid stuff required, etc. In all cases I kept saying "let's do the basic stuff now, then we'll have a baseline. If we want to start requiring those 2 extra fields instead of them being optional, we can see what effect it has on the checkout/abandon process". No one wanted to believe me that this was a valid approach; having a full service that costs $ might motivate people to listen to the authority a bit more.

This is a space I'd considered diving in to more, and am interested to see someone's going whole hog here. I'd looked at some 'fraud protection' services, but it didn't seem you'd be able to do much with them without having more data around the transaction (which was a lot of custom work and then some guesswork/testing around the process).

Good luck rbres!

Thanks mgkimsal -- could not agree with you more re: both checkout and fraud!

We're taking a strong stand against endless customization. While we'll have some styling options absolutely, we're pretty insistent in best-standards and letting the data speak.

Bolt is for people who want highest-performance decisions made for them. Customers who want to nitpick will have to write their own checkouts and will, for the most part, leave revenue on the table.

And the whole hog of data gives us a huge competitive advantage in manage regards, as you mention.

Also, Amazon checkout experience on their mobile app is not fast or some of the best in the market.

1) Add item to cart. 2) Click top-right cart icon to go to cart. 3) Click "Proceed to checkout" button 4) Change shipping address/shipping days on this page 4a) Click default shipping method 4b) Select the delivery options (One day, 2 days etc) 4c) Press "Continue" 4c.i) Repeat above for each shipping group 5) Press "Place your order"

I am very much confused what/how exactly are they trying to compete with Amazon checkout experience? Have we reached a point where inserting/competing with Amazon is de facto?

What about the swipe to instant purchase?

Agreed that Amazon is actually not the best at checkout, especially on mobile. What we're referencing is the fact that Amazon is able to invest $100M's and 100s of engineers into optimizing the checkout experience. Others really struggle. And, there are hundreds of things you can do to optimize checkout. Here's one study with examples: https://baymard.com/checkout-usability

We do all those things. We invest the engineering resources to perfect checkout so that you don't have to. Even our checkout today is not perfect, but it's way better than the one's we replace. And will continue to improve with every deploy.

"Amazon-like" can be a bit confusing. Really it appeals to our vision to help every online business compete with Amazon by optimizing their payments flows. And hopefully even create a superior-to-Amazon experience.

Ongoing discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215092

Actually the checkout experience is a small factor in Amazon's success (in online retailing). The main factors are 1) Big selection 2) Fast and convenient delivery 3) Low prices. The checkout experience just a small subset of point #2.

Right. There are a lot of elements of ecommerce success. Building a compelling online storefront, for instance, is a big one (thus Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, Demandware, WooCommerce, etc).

We're not here to solve everything around online commerce, at least not yet, But, the payments stack (checkout, fraud, internationalization, etc) is really difficult and results in substantial lost revenue. By helping convert 10%-50% more orders, we help businesses grow faster. That's our very simple goal.

It's still a factor for me when shopping, because I know they'll have my info already, I know the process, I'm not re-entering a bunch of stuff, etc.

Their before and after graphic is not only misleading but does not provide any useful information. What exactly are they trying to convey with greyed-out form fields? More fields to less fields?

Not all press pieces are perfect. Admittedly, the before/after graphic is not great. Go see real-world examples of checkout here and visit the sites: https://bolt.com/case-studies

Less fields, less time to complete checkout, 10%-50% higher completion rates (some merchants seeing over 150% higher completion rates).

This is a PR puff piece.

But a good one at that.

I think the value of a product like this would only be for first-time buyers since repeat purchasing is straightforward.

I wonder how this would compare with just adding a PayPal payment button in terms of drop off. I always zoom for the PayPal button when buying on a new site that I'd rather not share info with.

First-time buyer value prop is strong. The more you convert/approve and the better experience they have, the more they convert to repeat buyers. We're also going to be working on very cool repeat-buy features.

PayPal is great for PayPal account holders, but complete ineffective for non-PayPal account holders. So, it's pretty much useless for 95% of your traffic (most notably "guest checkout").

> So, it's pretty much useless for 95% of your traffic

This number sounds highly dubious (at least in the US). From my experience, when PayPal is offered in addition to normal credit card payments it will account for 15-25% of transactions.

click "See a Demo" -> "A Bolt expert will be in touch in less than 1 business hour."

WTF is this, can't I just see it in action? Maybe I'll just test-buy an invicta watch or something.

Yep try it on Invicta. The full demo goes through our dashboard, analytics, etc but testing checkout should give you a good overview.

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