Reaching One-Click Checkout Nirvana

In the world of ecommerce, there is no greater thorn in the side of shop owners than cart abandonment. When you look at the data, which reveals that cart abandonment is somewhere between 80 to 85% across the board — it’s clear that this is a problem aching for a solution. 

The reason cart abandonment is so high is because the checkout process is often over-complicated, requires too many clicks, asks the customer to provide too much information, the list goes on. There is so much friction involved that customers with intent to buy never reach the point of conversion. But what if that process could become seamless?

Domm Holland, the CEO of Fast, believes he’s achieved that frictionless experience thanks to a democratized one-click checkout solution that works across the internet. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Domm explains how that one-click solution works, and why it isn’t the answer to a payment problem, it’s actually solving an identity problem that permeates every industry.  

Main Takeaways:

• It’s a Long Road Home: It is a common misconception that the checkout process happens simply when the customer hits the buy button. The truth is that there are many steps to the checkout process, and in most cases they have not been optimized — that’s why cart abandonment rates are so high. In order to get customers to stop abandoning their carts, ecommerce platforms are doing everything they can to create a frictionless experience every step of the way. 
• One and Done: One-click ordering is the gold standard of frictionless checkout. Although some sites claim to have one-click checkout, you often are still multiple clicks away from actually finalizing an order, especially when you’re visiting for the first time, which requires you to fill out identification fields. By solving the identity problem for the consumer and by batching orders on the backend for merchants, Fast created a solution that delivers a true one-click checkout experience across the internet that can be installed directly on product pages.
• Open Your Mind: In the future, ecommerce will not take place only on ecommerce websites. From social media, to influencer content, to videos and more, one-click shopping will be coming to all of those channels so you will neve have to leave one site to shop on another. This means that opportunities for enterprising ecommerce minds will be there for the taking and those who take action quickly will unlock the value of a frictionless shopping experience and win customers for life.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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Transcript:

Stephanie:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postals, co-founder at mission.org. Joining us today, we have Domm Holland, the co-founder and CEO of Fast. Domm, welcome to the show.

Domm:

Hey Stephanie. Thanks so much for having me.

Stephanie:

Yeah, I'm really excited to have you. It's actually perfect because I was just going through a very poor checkout process, and I was like wow, what a perfect interview I have coming today. I think it took about 25 fields to fill in [crosstalk] and I was like I need Domm in my life. So tell me a little bit about Fast. What does Fast do, and how are you guys different?

Domm:

Yeah, so the simplest way to think of us is we're a one click checkout for the entire internet with no passwords. So it's a button that you'll see on websites that says Fast Checkout. When you click it, you'll instantly buy whatever you're looking at. And that could be a single item, so our button often sits above the add to cart button. So you can click Fast Checkout and just by the product instantly that you're looking at. You don't have to go add to cart, view cart, checkout and then go through 20 fields like you did, and then get to payment. It all happens in one click.

Domm:

Or you can click add to cart and sort of buy 20 items on the store and then use Fast Checkout at the end. Once you've used Fast Checkout to buy something, then you can track all your deliveries in one place. You can download all your receipts in one place. You can instantly reorder items you've ordered before through Fast from your Fast feed. So we have this fantastic and aggregated post purchase experience, which means again, you don't have to scramble to go back to remember the name of a site you bought something from a month ago and click a link from Gmail and then log in with a password you created for one store to try and find delivery date or something else. So yeah, we just try and make life easy and fast for consumers.

Stephanie:

That's amazing. So what led you to creating Fast? Was there a problem that you encountered yourself or what excited you about the payment ecosystem?

Domm:

Yeah, so originally it wasn't a payment problem. And fundamentally I think what Fast is solving for is actually an identity problem and payments is just one component of that. The original inception was I'm married with two little kids and my youngest child was in hospital for a few weeks, so we had my wife's grandmother staying with us and helping us out. One night she was sitting at the kitchen table ordering groceries for us and forgot a password and just couldn't order groceries. One of the largest supermarket chains in Australia, turn over $70 billion a year, just couldn't figure out how to charge a little old lady's credit card a couple hundred dollars for some food because of some broken string of text.

Domm:

It was just like a hard lockout. For her to be able to buy food, it didn't make sense. So at the time, I've got a [inaudible] of a passwords authentication system that can be used on ecommerce sites. The idea is granny could've just identified herself and then easily logged in and bought the groceries. But I think that I put it online, I had tens of thousands of people use it in a couple days and realize this is a big opportunity.

Domm:

But fundamentally, passwords aren't a problem, they're a symptom. Again, the problem is that each business requires us to re identify ourselves, which means create new account, create a new password. Login with this password created for one store. Fill in all these fields and forms from scratch. Give them payment information from scratch. Again, from a subscription standpoint, if you lose your credit card, suddenly your Netflix subscription doesn't work. Your [inaudible] subscriptions don't work. Everything is cut off because everyone has these siloed pools of data for us.

Domm:

So that's fundamentally what we solve for is just you not having to continually tell everyone who you are. I'm 33 years old. My name and date of birth and basic information hasn't changed in over three decades, yet I have to keep filling in forms and telling people as if it's brand new information. It doesn't make sense. So we solve for that and make that really easy. And payment is a part of that, an integral part of that, because it's part of the consumer experience. A lot of our consumer interactions involve financial transactions.

Domm:

But a lot of the time, it's just fundamentally making it easier for people to leverage their identity online.

Stephanie:

That's awesome. So earlier you were mentioning about your name and age not changing. What does the back end look like to solve for identity, and why hasn't this been done before?

Domm:

Yeah. Look, I think that there are companies had the opportunity to do this before. I think Facebook really had that opportunity. But [inaudible] didn't go down the identity space, they went down the advertising road. So rather than use your data to make your data portable and easy for consumers to use, they chose to your data for advertising.

Domm:

I don't think that from Facebook's perspective, I don't think it was a bad decision. Facebook makes a lot of money from doing that. But it's just a different... they can't then become your trusted source of data, if they're using your data for advertising as their primary source of revenue, then it's not really your trusted source for holding your private and sensitive information.

Domm:

So I think that there's been opportunities like that and I do think that advertising tends to kill identity products really quickly. But I think the other reality is that people have just kind of thought about things differently, or they've been solving their own problems, or they've been solving for business problems instead of consumer problems. And things like Apple, Apple building an ecosystem that you can now do log in sometimes, you can do check out if you're on Apple device on some sites and with some cards and that type of thing.

Domm:

They've got limited context, but