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Their selling point seems like you no longer had to create accounts on e-commerce websites and manually enter address & billing details? If so how did they jus

Their selling point seems like you no longer had to create accounts on e-commerce websites and manually enter address & billing details? If so how did they justify a $120M valuation and plan to deliver returns on what can trivially be replaced by a form-filling browser extension? I'm not saying this shouldn't exist - it actually sounds very valuable. But I see it as a one-off purchase for local software, not a SaaS from a bloated company that is on the hook for delivering returns to investors.

NationalPark 5y ago
With their $600k of revenue of course: https://twitter.com/sarthakgh/status/1508794202360004613 https://twitter.com/sarthakgh/status/1508794202360004613 Not for nothing, there can be a lot of value in simplifying things that could be trivially solved on a small scale by a programmer in an afternoon. A classic Hackernews comment about Dropbox and rsync comes to mind... sure doesn't seem be the case for Fast though.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I suspect the revenue comes from fees that merchants ultimately have to eat, right? If so, here's yet another rent-seeker that the merchants have to deal with, not to mention the potential leverage they get under (Fast could and will raise their fees in the long run). In contrast, a non-rent-seeking form-filler is no threat for merchants and is a win-win for everyone. In fact, it wouldn't even need explicit support from the merchant to begin with, where as Fast needs commitment from the merchant to integrate. I'm kinda happy that their attempt to seek rent on what is essentially form filling went down the drain where such an idea belongs in the first place.
dangus 5y ago
It basically sounds like shop.pay but without the benefit of having a huge install base of businesses already using the platform. I ended up a shop.pay user without even really asking for it, and I like it so much that I click the purple button every time I see it as an option. With apple and google pay and other similar platforms integrating directly with your browser this type of product seems like a crowded market with very little existing need.
- blahblah123456 5y ago
  In this case, it was actually a feature, not a product. Agreed on shop pay which also comes with the rest of the store. Even Bolt has the whole checkout flow at least
phpnode 5y ago
(I didn't know of this company's existence until their non-existence today) I don't think the idea is really that bad, and a form-filling browser extension would not be comparable to what they were trying to do here. The idea is pretty compelling in isolation - your random mom n pop ecommerce site can compete with Amazon on price for a lot of things, but it can't compete with convenience. If I go to Amazon I can buy something with one or two clicks and be pretty certain that my card details aren't going to get stolen and the thing I ordered will probably arrive when they say it will just about. If I go to a random ecommerce site I probably have to register, have to enter my card details and confront the possibility of getting ripped off. It's so much less convenient, so for most purchases I just go to Amazon, which is bad for a bunch of reasons. What Fast was promising to do was to bring that convenience and trust to ecommerce sites, so that they could become more competitive with the Amazons of this world, get more sales, make more money, consumers save money, everyone wins. Of course the problem is that they're only compelling when they're ubiquitous, and when everyone already has an account and everyone already trusts them. It's a bootstrapping problem, one that only really works if you burn a whole bunch of capital to get both consumers and suppliers signed up, or if you can piggyback off someone else's market penetration, e.g. Stripe, and even with that leg-up they weren't able to survive. All of this also ignores the existence of paypal, apple pay, google pay etc which do offer most of the convenience already.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  I agree that the idea is good, but I feel like it can be achieved just fine with a local-only form-filler, if it isn't already (all browsers and password managers now offer to save credit cards, and Apple & Google Pay even handle actual payment processing with better fraud protection). The bootstrapping problem seems like something of their own doing, both because it's a server-side solution as opposed to client-side, but also because there's most likely rent-seeking and extra fees involved. Every merchant wants to make more money so they should've had near-complete coverage very quickly unless there's a significant downside for the merchant for participating in said system.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
Psyonic 5y ago
Not a $120M valuation -- they raised $120M (https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/fast-raises-102m-as-the-online-checkout-wars-continue-to-attract-huge-investment/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/fast-raises-102m-as-the-on...) at an undisclosed valuation that must've been at least 500M. And spent it all in a year.
- the_common_man 5y ago
  > And spent it all in a year. that was fast !
tootie 5y ago
I've seen it in action at least once and I think it was a really good experience. Basically you could manage a single ecommerce profile and sellers could piggy-back on it and not have to set up their own payments system or even authentication. I think they may have put themselves in an awkward spot in between sellers and their customers data though. It's also a narrow niche in between fully-managed ecomm players like Shopify and fully custom platforms that big guys would be using.
- angryasian 5y ago
  is this a solution for basically sites that don't use paypal ?

NationalPark 5y ago

With their $600k of revenue of course: https://twitter.com/sarthakgh/status/1508794202360004613 https://twitter.com/sarthakgh/status/1508794202360004613 Not for nothing, there can be a lot of value in simplifying things that could be trivially solved on a small scale by a programmer in an afternoon. A classic Hackernews comment about Dropbox and rsync comes to mind... sure doesn't seem be the case for Fast though.

Nextgrid 5y ago
I suspect the revenue comes from fees that merchants ultimately have to eat, right? If so, here's yet another rent-seeker that the merchants have to deal with, not to mention the potential leverage they get under (Fast could and will raise their fees in the long run). In contrast, a non-rent-seeking form-filler is no threat for merchants and is a win-win for everyone. In fact, it wouldn't even need explicit support from the merchant to begin with, where as Fast needs commitment from the merchant to integrate. I'm kinda happy that their attempt to seek rent on what is essentially form filling went down the drain where such an idea belongs in the first place.

dangus 5y ago

It basically sounds like shop.pay but without the benefit of having a huge install base of businesses already using the platform. I ended up a shop.pay user without even really asking for it, and I like it so much that I click the purple button every time I see it as an option. With apple and google pay and other similar platforms integrating directly with your browser this type of product seems like a crowded market with very little existing need.

blahblah123456 5y ago
In this case, it was actually a feature, not a product. Agreed on shop pay which also comes with the rest of the store. Even Bolt has the whole checkout flow at least

phpnode 5y ago

(I didn't know of this company's existence until their non-existence today) I don't think the idea is really that bad, and a form-filling browser extension would not be comparable to what they were trying to do here. The idea is pretty compelling in isolation - your random mom n pop ecommerce site can compete with Amazon on price for a lot of things, but it can't compete with convenience. If I go to Amazon I can buy something with one or two clicks and be pretty certain that my card details aren't going to get stolen and the thing I ordered will probably arrive when they say it will just about. If I go to a random ecommerce site I probably have to register, have to enter my card details and confront the possibility of getting ripped off. It's so much less convenient, so for most purchases I just go to Amazon, which is bad for a bunch of reasons. What Fast was promising to do was to bring that convenience and trust to ecommerce sites, so that they could become more competitive with the Amazons of this world, get more sales, make more money, consumers save money, everyone wins. Of course the problem is that they're only compelling when they're ubiquitous, and when everyone already has an account and everyone already trusts them. It's a bootstrapping problem, one that only really works if you burn a whole bunch of capital to get both consumers and suppliers signed up, or if you can piggyback off someone else's market penetration, e.g. Stripe, and even with that leg-up they weren't able to survive. All of this also ignores the existence of paypal, apple pay, google pay etc which do offer most of the convenience already.

Nextgrid 5y ago
I agree that the idea is good, but I feel like it can be achieved just fine with a local-only form-filler, if it isn't already (all browsers and password managers now offer to save credit cards, and Apple & Google Pay even handle actual payment processing with better fraud protection). The bootstrapping problem seems like something of their own doing, both because it's a server-side solution as opposed to client-side, but also because there's most likely rent-seeking and extra fees involved. Every merchant wants to make more money so they should've had near-complete coverage very quickly unless there's a significant downside for the merchant for participating in said system.
- chrisseaton 5y ago

Psyonic 5y ago

Not a $120M valuation -- they raised $120M (https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/fast-raises-102m-as-the-online-checkout-wars-continue-to-attract-huge-investment/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/fast-raises-102m-as-the-on...) at an undisclosed valuation that must've been at least 500M. And spent it all in a year.

the_common_man 5y ago
> And spent it all in a year. that was fast !

tootie 5y ago

I've seen it in action at least once and I think it was a really good experience. Basically you could manage a single ecommerce profile and sellers could piggy-back on it and not have to set up their own payments system or even authentication. I think they may have put themselves in an awkward spot in between sellers and their customers data though. It's also a narrow niche in between fully-managed ecomm players like Shopify and fully custom platforms that big guys would be using.

angryasian 5y ago
is this a solution for basically sites that don't use paypal ?