At Bolt, we know that it’s harder than ever to run an ecommerce business. That’s why we’re excited to unveil 18 new features this summer to help retailers of all sizes thrive.
Businesses are facing some of the toughest challenges the ecommerce industry has ever seen. A bear market is looming and ecommerce is down 25% year over year. Which is why Bolt is here to help. This summer’s launch focuses on helping retailers improve conversion, turning one-time shoppers into lifetime customers, all while being increasingly cost conscious. The goal is to help you build your business faster and more efficiently, while driving a better shopper experience.
Here’s what we’ve been up to since our last launch in Spring 2022.
Increase Conversion and Grow Revenue
Shopper Assistant & SSO Commerce
With the depreciation of third-party cookies, it’s harder than ever to know who your shoppers are. That’s why driving account registrations is crucial to not only increase conversion, but also life-time value and repeat purchases.
Bolt’s Shopper Assistant and Single Sign-On (SSO) Commerce work hand-in-hand to help merchants achieve these goals. With the Shopper Assistant, first-time shoppers are incentivized to create a Bolt account and receive a discount on their first purchase. Then, SSO Commerce creates an account for your site – instantly increasing registrations.
This all adds up to a seamless, personalized experience for returning shoppers – and 80% of shoppers want personalized experiences from retailers. When a repeat customer visits your site, they’ll get product recommendations, see their order history, and more.
Checkout Everywhere (Buy Now, Checkout Links & QR Codes)
The digital age is upon us, and brands are innovating their offerings to attract increasingly tech-savvy consumers. And with privacy changes, reaching your shoppers where they are is getting increasingly difficult. Bolt helps retailers grow touchpoints with existing shoppers and reach new shoppers with features such as QR Codes, Checkout Links and the Buy Now Buttons.
Bolt Checkout Links give merchants the ability to create one-click links and sell products on first-party surfaces outside of their site–including emails, blogs, and newsletters. The feature allows merchants to reach audiences at scale with easy-to-set-up links that increase conversion, and decrease shopping cart abandonment rate.
Similar to Checkout Links, Bolt QR Codes removes a lot of extra steps. In a high conversion use case, it’s a great way to give shoppers fast and easy checkout. Shoppers can simply scan the QR code with the camera on their phone and tap to open the page where they can learn more about a product and then check out.
To remove checkout friction, the Buy Now button allows a customer to enter so that Bolt immediately recognizes that she’s in the Bolt network. Shoppers get a one time password texted to them and make a purchase with one click.
Checkout Enhancements
Leveraging our latest checkout enhancements is the perfect way to maximize average order value. Bolt’s checkout enhancements offer customizations, flexible shipping options, and personalized product recommendations..
Personalized add-ons allow retailers to maximize average orders values (AOV). Retailers can now upsell products in checkout based on what’s in a shopper’s cart, by syncing their own recommendation engine (in-house or third-party service) with Bolt. Product add-ons delight shoppers with products they otherwise would never come across, but would be excited to purchase.
Post-Purchase Upgrades
The shopper experience doesn’t end when shoppers click buy. Shoppers expect a great post-purchase experience and, if they don’t get it, they may buy somewhere else next time.
We’re excited to introduce an improved post-purchase experience, which includes newly designed order tracking and order confirmation pages with features including account creation, SMS update sign ups, product recommendations, and customization options for tailoring the experience to your brand’s look and feel.
With these new features, merchants can increase post-checkout account registrations, drive repeat purchases with personalized product recommendations, and reduce support tickets for your staff with real-time order information and SMS updates for both logged-in and guest shoppers.
Reduce Costs
Payment redundancy
Even the best payment processors have outages, which keeps shoppers from checking out and decreases revenue for merchants. Never miss an order with Bolt’s built-in backup payment processor, eliminating declined payments from outages.
Bolt Payments will be the default backup and act as a fail-safe when your primary processor goes down, providing the security of knowing that payments will still be processed. Once this is set up, when we detect an outage, we will automatically reroute transactions to Bolt Payments and shift back to the primary once the processor is back up. Bolt Payment Redundancy will be available for customers at the end of September.
Risk Assessment Scoring
Fraud is the 5-letter f word that nobody wants to deal with. Companies lose $20B in fraud each year and it’s difficult to know the risk of each transaction. Luckily, Bolt can help.
With Bolt, you get deep insights into risk scoring for credit card transactions so you can make more informed risk decisions. Risk Assessment Scoring is available for every Bolt customer, including those who already use Bolt Fraud Protections. You can see risk scoring for credit card transactions in the Merchant Dashboard. You’ll see a breakdown of the influencing factors, and get transparency into indemnification decisions.
For more information about our launches, visit: bolt.com/releases.
