[s_severus]

The thing that rarely gets discussed re Bolt and Fast is what most merchants think about the idea of one click checkout from product detail pages. IMO there are misaligned incentives in many, many cases in that this flow would tend to reduce average order value.

[nrmitchi]

So, something funny. I just spent way to long going through a random sample of merchants that they claim are in their "network" to try to see this thing in action.

Not a single one had a 1-click checkout button on their product pages. Presumably, for the exact reasons you mention. I had to add items to a cart, go through an upsell modal, get to a checkout page (or some sort) and then I could click on the " Checkout" button.

It seems that the reason that no one has seen a Bolt 1-click checkout button on a product page in real life, is because it.... doesn't exist?

The one saving grace option I give them is that the behaviour may be different as someone who does not have a Bolt account. It's possible that they are tracking users, and dynamically changing the "Add to Cart" button to a 1-click checkout if I'm signed in to their system.

This behaviour would still explain why people have never seen it.

[leviathant]

I was an ecommerce developer, moved to a sales engineer role after being on the unpleasant end of too many optimistic sales...

For years - YEARS - ecommerce RFPs included "one click checkout?" as a requirement, even while it was an active Amazon patent. Once the patent expired, our platform team implemented a one-click checkout feature. There's nothing fancy about it - you need a saved address and a saved payment tender, et voila. And still, the merchants would list in requirements, "One click checkout, must-have"

And I don't think even once in fifteen years of doing this did anyone ever actually use it. It helped me with demos, for sure.

In reality, Bolt and Fast weren't responding to a burning need for one-click checkout - they are (were?) responding to Shopify's locked down checkout, but they're all chasing the same greedy idea: use a "quick checkout" process to build a marketplace ecosystem, a la Amazon, and skim a percentage of every dollar in the orders that pass through them to do that, selling on the idea that quick checkout will boost sales. Which it might for some brands... but it usually doesn't have a noticeable effect.

But being a drop-shipper on a centralized marketplace is not what brands want. Amazon is, at best, an unpleasant necessity. You get a boost in sales up front, and if you make enough noise, Amazon starts selling advertising around you, and if things are going REALLY well, they spin up their own knockoff brand. With any luck, by that point you're a strong enough brand to drive people to purchase directly from your site, and then some startup comes around suggesting they can give you a better checkout experience than Shopify... and as you hear the pitch, it's transparent that they're just doing the same brand-erosion thing as Amazon and Shopify, and that erodes trust.

[ehnto]

It's too broad of a question to be answered generally I think. Each vendor has different goals and product lines that perform differently in this regard, and not all products can be bought in one click anyway.

For a shoe company, they realize that most people buy one pair at a time, so while they hope they can upsell you some shoe-shine they realise that their possibility to expand the cart is pretty low. I imagine one-click could work well for them.

A RC parts store on the other hand, there is huge room for cart expansion there. If you just sell someone an RC plane in one click, they may not even be able to use it without more purchases. They'll be wanting to add a receiver, some batteries, spare props etc.

[mschuster91]

Two things:

- 1-Click used to be patent protected until 2017. It may very well be possible that the news of the patent expiration didn't reach everyone, or that people are still afraid of patent trolls.

- unlike Amazon which has the payment and shipping information on file for every customer (which many people are), a random web shop selling sneakers won't, so the user has to go through the checkout process anyway.

[tootie]

It definitely reeks of a developer-driven idea. It's tight, efficient, fulfils the most complicated technical problem in ecomm in a tight package. But does it actually jibe with shopper behavior and maximizing revenue? Probably not.

[throwanem]

What's the mechanism behind the reduction? People foraging less and hunting more? Missing out on upsells further along in the funnel?

[flappyeagle]

Yes. If you capture real buyer intent in certain categories (including fashion) you can put a lot of obstacles in front of them and not disrupt the sale.

These might be up-sell or cart expansion opportunities. When a purchase is complete the user is likely to bounce.

[throwanem]

Yeah, I don't recall that we ever looked at this while I was with UA, so I haven't seen the failure modes firsthand and wanted to check my surmise. Thanks!

[ineedasername]

Go searching for a shirt, find one, click "buy" and you're done.

But if you click "add to cart" and you're presented with similar items, related suggestions, etc. Then maybe you shop around more, add a half dozen items to your cart as you go.

On the other hand maybe you add it to your cart, look around a bit more, but have time to rethink the purchase and bail before completion.

I'd guess some research has been done to shed light on the behavioral patterns, but they're also going to be highly specific to different product segments. If you're shopping for 2 or 3 new shirts you might be easily be persuaded into a 4th. But if it's cell phones then you're done after the first one, and you already know if you want a case or not so accessory upsells above & beyond the buyer's original intentions are probably more limited.

[nasmorn]

And how much different is it from using stripes checkout.ja 14b is a lot of money for what at least to me looks like a mere feature.

[moneywoes]

Could you elaborate a little? Do you think customers viewing pages for longer would lead to higher conversions?