A seamless, quick checkout experience encourages customers to return for future purchases and recommend the business to friends, potentially leading to new customer acquisition. A lengthy or confusing process, on the other hand, can lead to cart abandonment and dissatisfaction, resulting in lost revenue.
That’s the premise behind Fast, a one-click checkout system that CEO and co-founder Domm Holland hopes will be “available to every shopper on the internet.” The company launched this week with the goal of a single button that can be used anywhere online. The button would take users to a new checkout flow that doesn’t require credit card information or shipping addresses. Instead, a user would click on the button to buy a single product (or a full cart), then the Fast checkout system automatically saves that information and uses it for future checkouts.
The system was a hit with ecommerce entrepreneurs who could sign up for it in a matter of days and use it to offer 1-click checkout on their websites. Its simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t replace existing checkout solutions—it lives side-by-side with them, meaning merchants can use both a Stripe or Braintree checkout and also Fast—attracted a wide range of interest from investors. Stripe, for example, put $20 million into Fast’s Series A round in 2020.
However, payments is a game of scale and Fast was never able to grow fast enough to make a dent in the billions in processing fees that its competition does each year. That revenue comes largely from the kick-backs that the payment rails (Mastercard, Visa, and Amex) impose on companies that take care of the transactional details for their customers. Fast checkout