> It does things like track where the mouse is moving on the page, whether someone is copying and pasting information into the fields, whether they’re making typos, how fast they’re typing, and many other factors. By analyzing customer behavioral patterns, Bolt says it has a better shot at stopping fraud than just asking for the billing address.
Smells like bullshit, how is any of this meant to distinguish a mildly sophisticated fraudster from browser autofill?
CEO of Bolt here. Browser autofill is a very detectable pattern, amongst hundreds of other patterns that all become elements of a broader fraud model. This broader fraud model doesn't only incorporate behavioral features, but literally hundreds of other features around order details, personal details, shipping info.
May smell like BS (a lot of companies in this space are full of BS). But, we spent 3 years building a world-class data ingestion & ML engine which we'll describe more in future blog posts. And our case studies (https://bolt.com/case-studies) with more to come demonstrate the type of results we're able to achieve.
What's interesting to me is having an 'authority' in this space that people might trust. I can't tell you how much pain it was to work on some one-off ecommerce projects and have clients want to customize every stupid damn little thing. Arguing about font size, form fields, making stupid stuff required, etc. In all cases I kept saying "let's do the basic stuff now, then we'll have a baseline. If we want to start requiring those 2 extra fields instead of them being optional, we can see what effect it has on the checkout/abandon process". No one wanted to believe me that this was a valid approach; having a full service that costs $ might motivate people to listen to the authority a bit more.
This is a space I'd considered diving in to more, and am interested to see someone's going whole hog here. I'd looked at some 'fraud protection' services, but it didn't seem you'd be able to do much with them without having more data around the transaction (which was a lot of custom work and then some guesswork/testing around the process).
Thanks mgkimsal -- could not agree with you more re: both checkout and fraud!
We're taking a strong stand against endless customization. While we'll have some styling options absolutely, we're pretty insistent in best-standards and letting the data speak.
Bolt is for people who want highest-performance decisions made for them. Customers who want to nitpick will have to write their own checkouts and will, for the most part, leave revenue on the table.
And the whole hog of data gives us a huge competitive advantage in manage regards, as you mention.
Also, Amazon checkout experience on their mobile app is not fast or some of the best in the market.
1) Add item to cart.
2) Click top-right cart icon to go to cart.
3) Click "Proceed to checkout" button
4) Change shipping address/shipping days on this page
4a) Click default shipping method
4b) Select the delivery options (One day, 2 days etc)
4c) Press "Continue"
4c.i) Repeat above for each shipping group
5) Press "Place your order"
I am very much confused what/how exactly are they trying to compete with Amazon checkout experience? Have we reached a point where inserting/competing with Amazon is de facto?
Agreed that Amazon is actually not the best at checkout, especially on mobile. What we're referencing is the fact that Amazon is able to invest $100M's and 100s of engineers into optimizing the checkout experience. Others really struggle. And, there are hundreds of things you can do to optimize checkout. Here's one study with examples: https://baymard.com/checkout-usability
We do all those things. We invest the engineering resources to perfect checkout so that you don't have to. Even our checkout today is not perfect, but it's way better than the one's we replace. And will continue to improve with every deploy.
"Amazon-like" can be a bit confusing. Really it appeals to our vision to help every online business compete with Amazon by optimizing their payments flows. And hopefully even create a superior-to-Amazon experience.
Actually the checkout experience is a small factor in Amazon's success (in online retailing). The main factors are 1) Big selection 2) Fast and convenient delivery 3) Low prices. The checkout experience just a small subset of point #2.
Right. There are a lot of elements of ecommerce success. Building a compelling online storefront, for instance, is a big one (thus Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, Demandware, WooCommerce, etc).
We're not here to solve everything around online commerce, at least not yet, But, the payments stack (checkout, fraud, internationalization, etc) is really difficult and results in substantial lost revenue. By helping convert 10%-50% more orders, we help businesses grow faster. That's our very simple goal.
Their before and after graphic is not only misleading but does not provide any useful information. What exactly are they trying to convey with greyed-out form fields? More fields to less fields?
Not all press pieces are perfect. Admittedly, the before/after graphic is not great. Go see real-world examples of checkout here and visit the sites: https://bolt.com/case-studies
Less fields, less time to complete checkout, 10%-50% higher completion rates (some merchants seeing over 150% higher completion rates).
I think the value of a product like this would only be for first-time buyers since repeat purchasing is straightforward.
I wonder how this would compare with just adding a PayPal payment button in terms of drop off. I always zoom for the PayPal button when buying on a new site that I'd rather not share info with.
First-time buyer value prop is strong. The more you convert/approve and the better experience they have, the more they convert to repeat buyers. We're also going to be working on very cool repeat-buy features.
PayPal is great for PayPal account holders, but complete ineffective for non-PayPal account holders. So, it's pretty much useless for 95% of your traffic (most notably "guest checkout").
[+] [-] namelost|8 years ago|reply
Smells like bullshit, how is any of this meant to distinguish a mildly sophisticated fraudster from browser autofill?
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
May smell like BS (a lot of companies in this space are full of BS). But, we spent 3 years building a world-class data ingestion & ML engine which we'll describe more in future blog posts. And our case studies (https://bolt.com/case-studies) with more to come demonstrate the type of results we're able to achieve.
[+] [-] LyndsySimon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aembleton|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgkimsal|8 years ago|reply
This is a space I'd considered diving in to more, and am interested to see someone's going whole hog here. I'd looked at some 'fraud protection' services, but it didn't seem you'd be able to do much with them without having more data around the transaction (which was a lot of custom work and then some guesswork/testing around the process).
Good luck rbres!
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
We're taking a strong stand against endless customization. While we'll have some styling options absolutely, we're pretty insistent in best-standards and letting the data speak.
Bolt is for people who want highest-performance decisions made for them. Customers who want to nitpick will have to write their own checkouts and will, for the most part, leave revenue on the table.
And the whole hog of data gives us a huge competitive advantage in manage regards, as you mention.
[+] [-] CodeSheikh|8 years ago|reply
1) Add item to cart. 2) Click top-right cart icon to go to cart. 3) Click "Proceed to checkout" button 4) Change shipping address/shipping days on this page 4a) Click default shipping method 4b) Select the delivery options (One day, 2 days etc) 4c) Press "Continue" 4c.i) Repeat above for each shipping group 5) Press "Place your order"
I am very much confused what/how exactly are they trying to compete with Amazon checkout experience? Have we reached a point where inserting/competing with Amazon is de facto?
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
We do all those things. We invest the engineering resources to perfect checkout so that you don't have to. Even our checkout today is not perfect, but it's way better than the one's we replace. And will continue to improve with every deploy.
"Amazon-like" can be a bit confusing. Really it appeals to our vision to help every online business compete with Amazon by optimizing their payments flows. And hopefully even create a superior-to-Amazon experience.
[+] [-] bargl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lobo_tuerto|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16215092
[+] [-] nicodjimenez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
We're not here to solve everything around online commerce, at least not yet, But, the payments stack (checkout, fraud, internationalization, etc) is really difficult and results in substantial lost revenue. By helping convert 10%-50% more orders, we help businesses grow faster. That's our very simple goal.
[+] [-] mgkimsal|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CodeSheikh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
Less fields, less time to complete checkout, 10%-50% higher completion rates (some merchants seeing over 150% higher completion rates).
[+] [-] littleweep|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] BlainR|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] himynameistimli|8 years ago|reply
I wonder how this would compare with just adding a PayPal payment button in terms of drop off. I always zoom for the PayPal button when buying on a new site that I'd rather not share info with.
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
PayPal is great for PayPal account holders, but complete ineffective for non-PayPal account holders. So, it's pretty much useless for 95% of your traffic (most notably "guest checkout").
[+] [-] jacknews|8 years ago|reply
WTF is this, can't I just see it in action? Maybe I'll just test-buy an invicta watch or something.
[+] [-] rbres|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kapauldo|8 years ago|reply
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