Can anyone explain how any of these companies (Bolt, Fast, 1o) are doing anything different than "checkout with paypal"? What exactly is wrong with paypal that would make a merchant want to use Bolt instead?
The next time you checkout on any website that uses the same 1-click checkout provider, they already have your information for “1-click” checkout.
The investment thesis is that if 1-click checkout were to take off, it would become a winner-take-all market where every shop wants to use the 1-click provider with the largest customer base. This is the magical “network effect” that investors want to see. If it works and becomes ubiquitous, the network effects would be massive.
So far, none of the providers have managed to get much traffic at all. The common theme is that integrating 1-click checkout into everyone’s different web store has been a much bigger engineering challenge than they expected. They’re burning cash at shocking rates to do all of these custom integrations but not getting enough return on investment.
It’s also entirely unclear why Shopify or Stripe or another provider wouldn’t just step in and use their scale to make this happen themselves. I kind of suspect few people actually want 1-click checkout to begin with.
I've stopped using the Paypal option even though I really want to use it, because it makes me uncomfortable providing my credit card information to so many sites. Not sure what's changed, it used to work quite well. My guess is either there's a bug on PayPal's side with my account, or the PayPal integration has gotten more complicated and many websites have not kept up with certain changes.
Not saying you're wrong about that being the thesis, but the thesis makes no sense to me. It assumes that consumers are selecting shopping sites based on which payment service the sites use rather than on, say, price or selection.
The target market this investment thesis depends on is people who say, "I found a site with just the thing I wanted, but to buy it, I would have to enter my payment information! Guess it's back to Google to see if someone else has it at a similar price, and if not, I just won't buy it at all." Because the moment you give in and enter your payment and shipping details into a second checkout provider, that provider becomes just as convenient for future purchases as your first one.
Simple example is itch.io. Games on there are a couple of bucks. I have my payment information saved. People link a game to me, and I'll maybe impulse buy cuz I don't have to deal with making an account or setting up payment info.
It's silly, but I think it works in a certain sweet spot! But honestly I think the bigger thing than payment details is actual account creation. I'll go over to Amazon to buy a thing just to not deal with some product's bespoke checkout page, unless I really want to support the product's creator.
Usually this is due to having to type in all my data just to figure out what shipping options are, but I'm quite sure every step you make people do to check out results in x% fewer sales.
“We have a huge drop-off rate in our checkout flow! Customers have intent to buy and they’re somehow getting blocked in checkout; we need a smoother/faster checkout…”
No dumbass, you need to need to not charge $15 shipping on a product where you’re only $5 cheaper than your free shipping competitor.
- Conversion rates on the checkout page will be higher when user info is prefilled bc of less friction
- This means conversion rates will be highest for the one click checkout product with the largest market share
- This will lead to merchants choosing the one click checkout product with the largest market share, bc they want the best conversion rates
- This leads to VCs lighting money on fire trying to capture the market, since largest user network will be the main objective
This is assuming, of course, that checkout page UX and optimization is something all these companies will be able to do so it'll be a level playing field there. Given how much research and experimentation has gone into optimizing checkout pages, if these players all have buckets of VC money, that seems safe to me.
If I'm shopping for something and multiple sites offer it for the same price, which happens pretty often for many categories of products, I prefer the vendor with the easiest checkout experience and/or the fastest shipping.
This.
I trust Amazon almost implicitly. I know that they have all my information, and that I use the same shipping and payment method every single time. There should be no reason for 1-click checkout to not work perfectly every time.
And even there, I don't use it. I dunno. Is it really that much more effort to look at one more screen and get the feeling of security that the item is going to the right place and will get there on a day that makes sense?
If Amazon can't get me to use 1-click, No other merchant/retailer has any hope whatsoever.
It works for digital items (iTunes, Kindle) because the delivery is "to me, in the UX i'm using right now", not a physical item that has to come to an address.
I also imagine more than a few shoppers would be freaked out by seeing their card details stored on a site they've never used.
The ethics are, of course, terrible. I made myself a little sad just writing this!
If you transact with Bolt at least once through any of their merchants, then Bolt will have saved your billing and shipping information so that future purchases are instant and do not require checkout forms to be completed. Theoretically with the reduced checkout friction there is a reduction in abandoned carts.
Makes no sense to me either.
That they were able to raise 1B$ is a true dotcom era déjà vu.
I often use it as Paypal accepts Amex when a merchant may not. Works well and I've never had an issue.