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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. |