The next time you checkout on any website that uses the same 1-click checkout provider, they already have your information for “1-click” checkout.
The investment thesis is that if 1-click checkout were to take off, it would become a winner-take-all market where every shop wants to use the 1-click provider with the largest customer base. This is the magical “network effect” that investors want to see. If it works and becomes ubiquitous, the network effects would be massive.
So far, none of the providers have managed to get much traffic at all. The common theme is that integrating 1-click checkout into everyone’s different web store has been a much bigger engineering challenge than they expected. They’re burning cash at shocking rates to do all of these custom integrations but not getting enough return on investment.
It’s also entirely unclear why Shopify or Stripe or another provider wouldn’t just step in and use their scale to make this happen themselves. I kind of suspect few people actually want 1-click checkout to begin with.
