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Payment startup Bolt sued by its most prominent customer

171 points by babelfish 4y ago

s_severus 4y ago
The thing that rarely gets discussed re Bolt and Fast is what most merchants think about the idea of one click checkout from product detail pages. IMO there are misaligned incentives in many, many cases in that this flow would tend to reduce average order value.
- deleted 4y ago
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- nasmorn 4y ago
  And how much different is it from using stripes checkout.ja 14b is a lot of money for what at least to me looks like a mere feature.
- throwanem 4y ago
  What's the mechanism behind the reduction? People foraging less and hunting more? Missing out on upsells further along in the funnel?
  - flappyeagle 4y ago
    Yes. If you capture real buyer intent in certain categories (including fashion) you can put a lot of obstacles in front of them and not disrupt the sale. These might be up-sell or cart expansion opportunities. When a purchase is complete the user is likely to bounce.
    - throwanem 4y ago
      Yeah, I don't recall that we ever looked at this while I was with UA, so I haven't seen the failure modes firsthand and wanted to check my surmise. Thanks!
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    Go searching for a shirt, find one, click "buy" and you're done. But if you click "add to cart" and you're presented with similar items, related suggestions, etc. Then maybe you shop around more, add a half dozen items to your cart as you go. On the other hand maybe you add it to your cart, look around a bit more, but have time to rethink the purchase and bail before completion. I'd guess some research has been done to shed light on the behavioral patterns, but they're also going to be highly specific to different product segments. If you're shopping for 2 or 3 new shirts you might be easily be persuaded into a 4th. But if it's cell phones then you're done after the first one, and you already know if you want a case or not so accessory upsells above & beyond the buyer's original intentions are probably more limited.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  Could you elaborate a little? Do you think customers viewing pages for longer would lead to higher conversions?
- ehnto 4y ago
  It's too broad of a question to be answered generally I think. Each vendor has different goals and product lines that perform differently in this regard, and not all products can be bought in one click anyway. For a shoe company, they realize that most people buy one pair at a time, so while they hope they can upsell you some shoe-shine they realise that their possibility to expand the cart is pretty low. I imagine one-click could work well for them. A RC parts store on the other hand, there is huge room for cart expansion there. If you just sell someone an RC plane in one click, they may not even be able to use it without more purchases. They'll be wanting to add a receiver, some batteries, spare props etc.
- nrmitchi 4y ago
  So, something funny. I just spent way to long going through a random sample of merchants that they claim are in their "network" to try to see this thing in action. Not a single one had a 1-click checkout button on their product pages. Presumably, for the exact reasons you mention. I had to add items to a cart, go through an upsell modal, get to a checkout page (or some sort) and then I could click on the " Checkout" button. It seems that the reason that no one has seen a Bolt 1-click checkout button on a product page in real life, is because it.... doesn't exist? The one saving grace option I give them is that the behaviour may be different as someone who does not have a Bolt account. It's possible that they are tracking users, and dynamically changing the "Add to Cart" button to a 1-click checkout if I'm signed in to their system. This behaviour would still explain why people have never seen it.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - leviathant 4y ago
    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.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Two things: - 1-Click used to be patent protected until 2017. It may very well be possible that the news of the patent expiration didn't reach everyone, or that people are still afraid of patent trolls. - unlike Amazon which has the payment and shipping information on file for every customer (which many people are), a random web shop selling sneakers won't, so the user has to go through the checkout process anyway.
- tootie 4y ago
  It definitely reeks of a developer-driven idea. It's tight, efficient, fulfils the most complicated technical problem in ecomm in a tight package. But does it actually jibe with shopper behavior and maximizing revenue? Probably not.
rospaya 4y ago
Bolt FINANCIAL, not Bolt the Uber clone from Estonia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_(company)
- ecf 4y ago
  Pretty sure 99/100 people would assume it’s Bolt and not some startup from Estonia.
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    I was thinking about the car.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    "some startup from Estonia" happens to be bigger than the Bolt you are thinking of no matter how you measure it. Higher valuation, more employees, servers larger part of the world, was founded earlier etc. It makes sense to try to clear up confusion here, as anyone from Europe would assume you are talking about the very successful ride sharing company Bolt.
  - libeclipse 4y ago
    Why do you assume that? The Uber competitor is a huge company
    - giarc 4y ago
      Because the title (at least when I am reading this) states "Payment startup"
mhornbacher 4y ago
I thought it was the exploding car for a second
kumarm 4y ago
[In the suit, ABG also says its agreement with the startup entitles the company to buy up to 5% of Bolt for $29 million. Bolt’s filing said it is not obligated to sell. At Bolt’s current valuation, that stake would be worth about $500 million.] from the article.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Lol I've seen this defense before. Basically a contract days that so and so has the right to purchase with conditions, and the other party says just because they have right of first refusal doesn't mean that they have to sell anything. Best of luck to them in court, but you don't put something like that into a contract just for fun and so hopefully the judge will tell them to cut the shit and honor the deal.
cebert 4y ago
A part of me wants Bolt to be successful because they’re pushing new ideas like four day work weeks. While flexible schedules may not be for everyone, having it as a option is nice.
- northerdome 4y ago
  This! I don't doubt that Bolt still requires a lot of work and honestly the 4 day work week is probably more marketing speak than anything real. But the world (at remote companies at least) has drastically changed and there is no reason to expect everyone to always have the same hours. Work when you need to to get your stuff done. Be around at pre-decided hours when you need to collaborate. But the rest is up to you.
  - erikerikson 4y ago
    Is https://4dayweek.io/ https://4dayweek.io/ not real enough?
    - rsanek 4y ago
      How many of the companies listed there have a >$10b valuation?
  - xmprt 4y ago
    I find that I often need to have quick conversations with coworkers while working. These can't be pre-planned meetings because if they were then I'd be blocked for up to a full day. Personally I'm much more in favor of 3 or 4 day work weeks where everyone is available and then having more days that are completely free to myself. Unfortunately, it seems like the world has converged on this hybrid schedule where you come into work for a few days (meaning you still have to live near work and commute) but also work remotely the rest of the time (meaning a lot of communication is async and inefficient if the company isn't built remote first).
    - josephd79 4y ago
      I think the bigger issue is people are still trying to work remotely like they’re in the office.
aabhay 4y ago
So what’s the damage? Is this company completely fraudulent, embellishing, or genuinely worth it? Having never seen or used this product/feature on any site I am totally unaware. I have also never met anyone who has used their product or seen it.
- nrmitchi 4y ago
  If a company is based on its network effects, and is “worth” $11B, in an industry that you participate in, and you nor anyone you have ever met has seen it in the wild, it at least implies that something fishy is going on.
  - kumarm 4y ago
    Comments like these are what make people like me to think may be bolt ex CEO has a point. Have you even read the article? ABG as part of lawsuit want 5% of stake in business for 30M (valued at 500M currently). Obviously their customer who is suing them want a part of business says something. Also article clearly mentions forever21 uses them.
    - arbuge 4y ago
      > Obviously their customer who is suing them want a part of business says something. It might just say that they want to be able to take that stake and liquidate it now quickly while the private markets still have a high value on it.
      - daveed 4y ago
        The "private markets" right now are probably depressed, given that ABG is suing and kind of shitting on them? If they want a position in Bolt I feel like it would be the long view.
    - nrmitchi 4y ago
      I have read the article, and I’m still not sure what your point was. Are you claiming that I’m part of “the mob”? My comment had nothing to do with ABG, or them wanting whatever is in their contract. It was commenting on that fact that I, not apparently the parent commenter, has ever actually seen the Bolt product in the wild. That’s weird for something apparently valued at 250x their ARR. Regarding ABG’s claim to a 5% stake, you can’t comment on what that means without knowing the terms that apply.
hoofhearted 4y ago
https://archive.ph/QZU9T https://archive.ph/QZU9T
sonicggg 4y ago
Ouch, they are valued at $11 billion, that's insane. I smell a lot of bag holders. How do they explain this valuation in a market where payment processors are a dime a dozen? I purchase a lot of stuff online, and have yet to find a merchant that uses Bolt.
- threeseed 4y ago
  Because it's not a payment processor. It's instead a polished, hosted UI component that integrates with payment processors. And the valuation is because they have a lot of customers and they clearly make a lot of money.
  - nrmitchi 4y ago
    According to their "shopping network" they have 249 merchants in their network. Note that this is their "shopping" page, so it doesn't make sense for them to hide customers. Their ARR is reportedly $40M. This gives a ARR multipe of.... 275x. Which is ridiculous. And, as you mentioned too, they're not a payment processor. They're a hosted UI. It would be interesting if the cost of processing fees is accounted for in the reported ARR numbers.
  - runeks 4y ago
    > […] they clearly make a lot of money. Clear from what?
  - sonicggg 4y ago
    In that case they offer even less value than I imagined.
- deleted 4y ago
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mb_72 4y ago
So this 'Bolt' is the same as or different from 'Bolt' the taxi/scooter hire company?
- peanuty1 4y ago
  Yes, the Bolt you're thinking of is an Estonian company.
  - mb_72 4y ago
    I live in Estonia, hence my confusion.
    - nottorp 4y ago
      I live in Romania and still thought of the taxi company.
didibus 4y ago
What's the advantage of using something like Bolt over allowing Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, Pay with Amazon for example?
- homero 4y ago
  The was a company that gave you a customers email address when they used it anywhere on the network. So they probably offer more data.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    4 hour work weeks
Jedd 4y ago
From the video (interview): > 75% of people (85% if you include mobile) abandon your site at cart checkout - that's a trillion dollar problem in the US each year. Well, I can see at least two problems with that claim. First, anecdata, I'll often be forced to get to the checkout stage just to find out what shipping is going to cost me -- this may be more a problem in my region (Australia) where shipping can be onerous, and vary wildly between vendors, so it's an inevitable, but quite time-consuming way of comparing total costs. Second, even assuming that number is accurate (it's not clear how he got there) those trillion dollars are very much part of a zero sum calculation. It reminds me of the old hyperbolic claims that piracy was removing billions of dollars from the economy.
- buro9 4y ago
  Or your checkout could be Klarna which demands your date of birth... Which I am never going to give to a shop just to purchase a piece of clothing. But my transaction didn't vanish, it wasn't abandoned, I consciously moved it to a competitor who won't ask me for my date of birth. No money disappeared from the economy, no more was added, it just went to a company that moderates it's demands for data. And retailer, if I could tell you this I would but you don't offer a feedback collector during checkout and by the time you've followed up on the abandoned checkout I've probably already received the item from your competitor.
  - lozenge 4y ago
    Klarna is just a payment option, and one which is a line of credit too. You could have just selected a different method surely?
    - buro9 4y ago
      It depends. Some merchants offer PayPal or Card or Klarna as options on the first part of checkout. Those are fine. Some merchants though, have given their entire checkout process to Klarna and the card and other options are downstream of entering the Klarna checkout process. This means that you'll have the date of birth question, and also be sending your transaction data to a credit company, even if you're still paying fully by debit card. Two examples I recently encountered were UK PC parts merchant, I've being sponsoring a child of an impoverished single mum ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NCHV1pcTyvtbbE-mBDFhE1K7iSWS2SDKE54J6VKCIB0/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NCHV1pcTyvtbbE-mBDFhE1K7... ) and he'd managed to earn enough to purchase a custom computer - he's only 12 and this is such an achievement. We used pcpartpicker to design the build, and two of the suppliers recommended by that in the UK have fully given up their checkout process to Klarna. I switched ordering those parts to Scan and Box instead.
jokethrowaway 4y ago
I find it ridiculous that you need a custom checkout provider to implement one click purchase on your platform, no matter how big and inefficient your corporation may be. Once you collect a CC from your customer, you just need a reference to that token to charge at will on something like stripe (or even better, schedule a charge in 5m to give undo capabilities). That said, reading their claims I'm inclined to side with Bolt, ABG is just experiencing some normal integration pain.
- Brystephor 4y ago
  initiating a charge doesn't seem to be the challenge. It's how do you identify the person and where to ship the goods that's the challenge.
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  Have you ever worked on consumer checkout systems before? This sounds a bit like dismissing Dropbox as glorified rsync. The amount of edge cases you need to handle is astounding.
halamadrid 4y ago
I'm sure the VCs who funded Bolt recently did their due diligence and this could have easily been brought up during that time? If ABG is their prominent customer I bet the VCs spoke to them. At this time it seems like ABG is upset that they can't get the 5% stake and trying to damage the company as much as possible.
- nowherebeen 4y ago
  This is such a flawed argument that keeps coming up: someone else must of done their due diligence.
  - rsstack 4y ago
    I read GP as a joke referring to Fast's VCs lack of due diligence. If it was serious and not a Fast joke: that's even funnier.
globalise83 4y ago
Is this basically the same product as Fast Checkout? Any reason to believe this will be more successful?
- jross225 4y ago
  Fast didn't make it to market. I would see two ways that Bolt would be a success: 1. Grow with Big Commerce 2. We see a hard push to headless commerce, and Bolt becomes the "Shopify of Checkout" or something similar specifically for the headless use case.
- tootie 4y ago
  "Yes" and "who knows". Fast had a decent product but just didn't find market fit. It's not unheard of for a cohort of competitors to find different market conditions but it's definitely a bad sign. I think they're trying to occupy a very small niche in between pure payment providers like Stripe and holistic e-commerce platforms like Shopify. The idea is compelling but idk how the economics will work with such a small addressable market.
raiyu 4y ago
I do alot of e-commerce purchases from various retailers, probably 3-4 a week, every week! The one click checkout has already been solved. It’s Apple Pay. Any time I see that on a retailer i always use them because of how easy it is, all payment info, shipping info, etc are prestored, and if they integrate Apple Pay directly or through their merchant processor my trust level immediately increases. It does help increase conversion as i do abandon some carts without that and it makes me a repeat shopper of the places that integrate. It is a solid concept the real issue is that between Fast and Bolt it looks more like the wrong founder CEOs rather than anything else. One is completely shady and the other spends way too much time on twitter and is now potentially caught misleading customers and investors. If they had focused more on their business and moving quickly but sustainably one if these two companies would be succeeding instead of both of them looking like they have massive issues.
- nameless912 4y ago
  Yup, this exactly but with Google Pay for me. I have had an android phone since 2009, and I have all my credit cards attached to GPay so that I get alerts when they're used, etc. The only payment processors I end up using on an average day online are GPay and Amazon (since I have a prime subscription, AMZN has my info as well). I don't really get the existence of these startups since those these three options (AMZN, AAPL, GOOG) are all pretty much equally good and easy, and you probably have your credit card set up in at least one of them.

171 points by babelfish 4y ago

The thing that rarely gets discussed re Bolt and Fast is what most merchants think about the idea of one click checkout from product detail pages. IMO there are misaligned incentives in many, many cases in that this flow would tend to reduce average order value.

deleted 4y ago
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nasmorn 4y ago
And how much different is it from using stripes checkout.ja 14b is a lot of money for what at least to me looks like a mere feature.
throwanem 4y ago
What's the mechanism behind the reduction? People foraging less and hunting more? Missing out on upsells further along in the funnel?
- flappyeagle 4y ago
  Yes. If you capture real buyer intent in certain categories (including fashion) you can put a lot of obstacles in front of them and not disrupt the sale. These might be up-sell or cart expansion opportunities. When a purchase is complete the user is likely to bounce.
  - throwanem 4y ago
    Yeah, I don't recall that we ever looked at this while I was with UA, so I haven't seen the failure modes firsthand and wanted to check my surmise. Thanks!
- ineedasername 4y ago
  Go searching for a shirt, find one, click "buy" and you're done. But if you click "add to cart" and you're presented with similar items, related suggestions, etc. Then maybe you shop around more, add a half dozen items to your cart as you go. On the other hand maybe you add it to your cart, look around a bit more, but have time to rethink the purchase and bail before completion. I'd guess some research has been done to shed light on the behavioral patterns, but they're also going to be highly specific to different product segments. If you're shopping for 2 or 3 new shirts you might be easily be persuaded into a 4th. But if it's cell phones then you're done after the first one, and you already know if you want a case or not so accessory upsells above & beyond the buyer's original intentions are probably more limited.
moneywoes 4y ago
Could you elaborate a little? Do you think customers viewing pages for longer would lead to higher conversions?
ehnto 4y ago
It's too broad of a question to be answered generally I think. Each vendor has different goals and product lines that perform differently in this regard, and not all products can be bought in one click anyway. For a shoe company, they realize that most people buy one pair at a time, so while they hope they can upsell you some shoe-shine they realise that their possibility to expand the cart is pretty low. I imagine one-click could work well for them. A RC parts store on the other hand, there is huge room for cart expansion there. If you just sell someone an RC plane in one click, they may not even be able to use it without more purchases. They'll be wanting to add a receiver, some batteries, spare props etc.
nrmitchi 4y ago
So, something funny. I just spent way to long going through a random sample of merchants that they claim are in their "network" to try to see this thing in action. Not a single one had a 1-click checkout button on their product pages. Presumably, for the exact reasons you mention. I had to add items to a cart, go through an upsell modal, get to a checkout page (or some sort) and then I could click on the " Checkout" button. It seems that the reason that no one has seen a Bolt 1-click checkout button on a product page in real life, is because it.... doesn't exist? The one saving grace option I give them is that the behaviour may be different as someone who does not have a Bolt account. It's possible that they are tracking users, and dynamically changing the "Add to Cart" button to a 1-click checkout if I'm signed in to their system. This behaviour would still explain why people have never seen it.
- deleted 4y ago
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- leviathant 4y ago
  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.
mschuster91 4y ago
Two things: - 1-Click used to be patent protected until 2017. It may very well be possible that the news of the patent expiration didn't reach everyone, or that people are still afraid of patent trolls. - unlike Amazon which has the payment and shipping information on file for every customer (which many people are), a random web shop selling sneakers won't, so the user has to go through the checkout process anyway.
tootie 4y ago
It definitely reeks of a developer-driven idea. It's tight, efficient, fulfils the most complicated technical problem in ecomm in a tight package. But does it actually jibe with shopper behavior and maximizing revenue? Probably not.

rospaya 4y ago

Bolt FINANCIAL, not Bolt the Uber clone from Estonia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolt_(company)

ecf 4y ago
Pretty sure 99/100 people would assume it’s Bolt and not some startup from Estonia.
- willcipriano 4y ago
  I was thinking about the car.
- Jensson 4y ago
  "some startup from Estonia" happens to be bigger than the Bolt you are thinking of no matter how you measure it. Higher valuation, more employees, servers larger part of the world, was founded earlier etc. It makes sense to try to clear up confusion here, as anyone from Europe would assume you are talking about the very successful ride sharing company Bolt.
- libeclipse 4y ago
  Why do you assume that? The Uber competitor is a huge company
  - giarc 4y ago
    Because the title (at least when I am reading this) states "Payment startup"

mhornbacher 4y ago

I thought it was the exploding car for a second

kumarm 4y ago

[In the suit, ABG also says its agreement with the startup entitles the company to buy up to 5% of Bolt for $29 million. Bolt’s filing said it is not obligated to sell. At Bolt’s current valuation, that stake would be worth about $500 million.] from the article.

encryptluks2 4y ago
Lol I've seen this defense before. Basically a contract days that so and so has the right to purchase with conditions, and the other party says just because they have right of first refusal doesn't mean that they have to sell anything. Best of luck to them in court, but you don't put something like that into a contract just for fun and so hopefully the judge will tell them to cut the shit and honor the deal.

cebert 4y ago

A part of me wants Bolt to be successful because they’re pushing new ideas like four day work weeks. While flexible schedules may not be for everyone, having it as a option is nice.

northerdome 4y ago
This! I don't doubt that Bolt still requires a lot of work and honestly the 4 day work week is probably more marketing speak than anything real. But the world (at remote companies at least) has drastically changed and there is no reason to expect everyone to always have the same hours. Work when you need to to get your stuff done. Be around at pre-decided hours when you need to collaborate. But the rest is up to you.
- erikerikson 4y ago
  Is https://4dayweek.io/ https://4dayweek.io/ not real enough?
  - rsanek 4y ago
    How many of the companies listed there have a >$10b valuation?
- xmprt 4y ago
  I find that I often need to have quick conversations with coworkers while working. These can't be pre-planned meetings because if they were then I'd be blocked for up to a full day. Personally I'm much more in favor of 3 or 4 day work weeks where everyone is available and then having more days that are completely free to myself. Unfortunately, it seems like the world has converged on this hybrid schedule where you come into work for a few days (meaning you still have to live near work and commute) but also work remotely the rest of the time (meaning a lot of communication is async and inefficient if the company isn't built remote first).
  - josephd79 4y ago
    I think the bigger issue is people are still trying to work remotely like they’re in the office.

aabhay 4y ago

So what’s the damage? Is this company completely fraudulent, embellishing, or genuinely worth it? Having never seen or used this product/feature on any site I am totally unaware. I have also never met anyone who has used their product or seen it.

nrmitchi 4y ago
If a company is based on its network effects, and is “worth” $11B, in an industry that you participate in, and you nor anyone you have ever met has seen it in the wild, it at least implies that something fishy is going on.
- kumarm 4y ago
  Comments like these are what make people like me to think may be bolt ex CEO has a point. Have you even read the article? ABG as part of lawsuit want 5% of stake in business for 30M (valued at 500M currently). Obviously their customer who is suing them want a part of business says something. Also article clearly mentions forever21 uses them.
  - arbuge 4y ago
    > Obviously their customer who is suing them want a part of business says something. It might just say that they want to be able to take that stake and liquidate it now quickly while the private markets still have a high value on it.
    - daveed 4y ago
      The "private markets" right now are probably depressed, given that ABG is suing and kind of shitting on them? If they want a position in Bolt I feel like it would be the long view.
  - nrmitchi 4y ago
    I have read the article, and I’m still not sure what your point was. Are you claiming that I’m part of “the mob”? My comment had nothing to do with ABG, or them wanting whatever is in their contract. It was commenting on that fact that I, not apparently the parent commenter, has ever actually seen the Bolt product in the wild. That’s weird for something apparently valued at 250x their ARR. Regarding ABG’s claim to a 5% stake, you can’t comment on what that means without knowing the terms that apply.

hoofhearted 4y ago

https://archive.ph/QZU9T https://archive.ph/QZU9T

sonicggg 4y ago

Ouch, they are valued at $11 billion, that's insane. I smell a lot of bag holders. How do they explain this valuation in a market where payment processors are a dime a dozen? I purchase a lot of stuff online, and have yet to find a merchant that uses Bolt.

threeseed 4y ago
Because it's not a payment processor. It's instead a polished, hosted UI component that integrates with payment processors. And the valuation is because they have a lot of customers and they clearly make a lot of money.
- nrmitchi 4y ago
  According to their "shopping network" they have 249 merchants in their network. Note that this is their "shopping" page, so it doesn't make sense for them to hide customers. Their ARR is reportedly $40M. This gives a ARR multipe of.... 275x. Which is ridiculous. And, as you mentioned too, they're not a payment processor. They're a hosted UI. It would be interesting if the cost of processing fees is accounted for in the reported ARR numbers.
- runeks 4y ago
  > […] they clearly make a lot of money. Clear from what?
- sonicggg 4y ago
  In that case they offer even less value than I imagined.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mb_72 4y ago

So this 'Bolt' is the same as or different from 'Bolt' the taxi/scooter hire company?

peanuty1 4y ago
Yes, the Bolt you're thinking of is an Estonian company.
- mb_72 4y ago
  I live in Estonia, hence my confusion.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    I live in Romania and still thought of the taxi company.

didibus 4y ago

What's the advantage of using something like Bolt over allowing Google Pay, Apple Pay, PayPal, Pay with Amazon for example?

homero 4y ago
The was a company that gave you a customers email address when they used it anywhere on the network. So they probably offer more data.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  4 hour work weeks

Jedd 4y ago

From the video (interview): > 75% of people (85% if you include mobile) abandon your site at cart checkout - that's a trillion dollar problem in the US each year. Well, I can see at least two problems with that claim. First, anecdata, I'll often be forced to get to the checkout stage just to find out what shipping is going to cost me -- this may be more a problem in my region (Australia) where shipping can be onerous, and vary wildly between vendors, so it's an inevitable, but quite time-consuming way of comparing total costs. Second, even assuming that number is accurate (it's not clear how he got there) those trillion dollars are very much part of a zero sum calculation. It reminds me of the old hyperbolic claims that piracy was removing billions of dollars from the economy.

buro9 4y ago
Or your checkout could be Klarna which demands your date of birth... Which I am never going to give to a shop just to purchase a piece of clothing. But my transaction didn't vanish, it wasn't abandoned, I consciously moved it to a competitor who won't ask me for my date of birth. No money disappeared from the economy, no more was added, it just went to a company that moderates it's demands for data. And retailer, if I could tell you this I would but you don't offer a feedback collector during checkout and by the time you've followed up on the abandoned checkout I've probably already received the item from your competitor.
- lozenge 4y ago
  Klarna is just a payment option, and one which is a line of credit too. You could have just selected a different method surely?
  - buro9 4y ago
    It depends. Some merchants offer PayPal or Card or Klarna as options on the first part of checkout. Those are fine. Some merchants though, have given their entire checkout process to Klarna and the card and other options are downstream of entering the Klarna checkout process. This means that you'll have the date of birth question, and also be sending your transaction data to a credit company, even if you're still paying fully by debit card. Two examples I recently encountered were UK PC parts merchant, I've being sponsoring a child of an impoverished single mum ( https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NCHV1pcTyvtbbE-mBDFhE1K7iSWS2SDKE54J6VKCIB0/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NCHV1pcTyvtbbE-mBDFhE1K7... ) and he'd managed to earn enough to purchase a custom computer - he's only 12 and this is such an achievement. We used pcpartpicker to design the build, and two of the suppliers recommended by that in the UK have fully given up their checkout process to Klarna. I switched ordering those parts to Scan and Box instead.

jokethrowaway 4y ago

I find it ridiculous that you need a custom checkout provider to implement one click purchase on your platform, no matter how big and inefficient your corporation may be. Once you collect a CC from your customer, you just need a reference to that token to charge at will on something like stripe (or even better, schedule a charge in 5m to give undo capabilities). That said, reading their claims I'm inclined to side with Bolt, ABG is just experiencing some normal integration pain.

Brystephor 4y ago
initiating a charge doesn't seem to be the challenge. It's how do you identify the person and where to ship the goods that's the challenge.
flappyeagle 4y ago
Have you ever worked on consumer checkout systems before? This sounds a bit like dismissing Dropbox as glorified rsync. The amount of edge cases you need to handle is astounding.

halamadrid 4y ago

I'm sure the VCs who funded Bolt recently did their due diligence and this could have easily been brought up during that time? If ABG is their prominent customer I bet the VCs spoke to them. At this time it seems like ABG is upset that they can't get the 5% stake and trying to damage the company as much as possible.

nowherebeen 4y ago
This is such a flawed argument that keeps coming up: someone else must of done their due diligence.
- rsstack 4y ago
  I read GP as a joke referring to Fast's VCs lack of due diligence. If it was serious and not a Fast joke: that's even funnier.

globalise83 4y ago

Is this basically the same product as Fast Checkout? Any reason to believe this will be more successful?

jross225 4y ago
Fast didn't make it to market. I would see two ways that Bolt would be a success: 1. Grow with Big Commerce 2. We see a hard push to headless commerce, and Bolt becomes the "Shopify of Checkout" or something similar specifically for the headless use case.
tootie 4y ago
"Yes" and "who knows". Fast had a decent product but just didn't find market fit. It's not unheard of for a cohort of competitors to find different market conditions but it's definitely a bad sign. I think they're trying to occupy a very small niche in between pure payment providers like Stripe and holistic e-commerce platforms like Shopify. The idea is compelling but idk how the economics will work with such a small addressable market.

raiyu 4y ago

I do alot of e-commerce purchases from various retailers, probably 3-4 a week, every week! The one click checkout has already been solved. It’s Apple Pay. Any time I see that on a retailer i always use them because of how easy it is, all payment info, shipping info, etc are prestored, and if they integrate Apple Pay directly or through their merchant processor my trust level immediately increases. It does help increase conversion as i do abandon some carts without that and it makes me a repeat shopper of the places that integrate. It is a solid concept the real issue is that between Fast and Bolt it looks more like the wrong founder CEOs rather than anything else. One is completely shady and the other spends way too much time on twitter and is now potentially caught misleading customers and investors. If they had focused more on their business and moving quickly but sustainably one if these two companies would be succeeding instead of both of them looking like they have massive issues.

nameless912 4y ago
Yup, this exactly but with Google Pay for me. I have had an android phone since 2009, and I have all my credit cards attached to GPay so that I get alerts when they're used, etc. The only payment processors I end up using on an average day online are GPay and Amazon (since I have a prime subscription, AMZN has my info as well). I don't really get the existence of these startups since those these three options (AMZN, AAPL, GOOG) are all pretty much equally good and easy, and you probably have your credit card set up in at least one of them.