Why Hasn’t One-Click Checkout Gained Much Traction Beyond Amazon?

Research from Cornell University finds adding “one-click” checkout leads online shoppers to increase their website visits, purchase a broader range of merchandise and spend an average of 28.5 percent more versus previous buying levels.

“Because one-click takes so much pain away from the shopping experience, we see consumers willing to spend more time on the site and search for more items,” said Murat Unal, a former Cornell professor who’s now an economist at Amazon.com, in an article for the Cornell Chronicle.

One-click checkout requires customers to store payment and delivery information with the retailer beforehand, eliminating the tedium of doing so with every checkout.

Amazon is known for its “Buy Now” button partly because it held the “1-Click” patent from 1999 until 2017. Amazon licensed the technology to Apple just before the launch of iTunes.

In a Knowledge at Wharton podcast recorded soon after the patent expired, Kartik Hosanagar, a Wharton marketing professor, described one-click as a “huge asset” for Amazon and “a very important event in the history of e-commerce.” He elaborated, “First, it was a very simple and intuitive system and generated a lot of controversy — could something so simple and obvious be patented? Second, it became an important part of the experience that Amazon offered and became a flag bearer for the convenient shopping experience that Amazon came to be known. And finally, it showed how e-commerce was as much about technology and data as it was about retail.”

Paypal, Apple and Shopify have introduced one-click offerings with the promise of reducing cart abandonment, but one-click isn’t as pervasive as some predicted it would become after the patent’s expiration. One-click checkout startups have also faced turbulence with Stripe-backed Fast shutting down last year and Bolt undergoing layoffs earlier this year amid revenue shortfalls.

Joseph Yang, a partner at PatentEsque Law Group, believes Amazon still has a competitive advantage due to its long ownership of the patent. He told Business Insider last year, “You start to build up these huge databases of information, and you start keeping records of past purchases, and a lot of the value in your business is actually in the data.”