The Beginning of the End of Payments

<blockquote>The Internet enables anyone to effortlessly communicate with anyone else across the world. Yet, buying and selling goods online is far from effortless.&nbsp;Introducing Bolt, Amazon-like payments with zero fraud for online merchants.The Internet enables anyone to effortlessly communicate with anyone else across the world. Yet, buying and selling goods online is far from effortless.&nbsp;Introducing Bolt, Amazon-like payments with zero fraud for online merchants.</blockquote>Customers need to re-enter <a href="https://example.com">personal</a> information, billing addresses, credit card numbers, shipping information – dozens of separate forms – into a clunky interface every time they make a purchase. About 70% of customers abandon ship during checkout (<a href="https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate">1</a>). Worse, 15% of legitimate cardholders are falsely declined for fraud suspicions (<a href="https://www.javelinstrategy.com/press-release/false-positive-card-declines-push-consumers-abandon-issuers-and-merchants">2</a>).Online merchants need to select between hundreds of different payment processors, checkout tools, and fraud detection providers, wire them together, optimize their checkout flows, and manually review transactions.In the end, online merchants spend significant resources managing their payments systems, only to see billions of dollars lost due to poor checkout experiences and inaccurate fraud detection.This led us to a crazy idea: effortless payments – both for consumers and merchants. For consumers, making a purchase should require no more than 3 steps:<ul><li>Select items</li><li>Enter shipping address</li><li>Authorize payment</li></ul>For merchants, enabling payments should be as easy as a single install or a few lines of code. It was a vision we couldn’t unsee: payments that just work, without the pain and complexity. So we built what we hope will be the last payments company you’ll ever need to know about.<h2>Enter Bolt</h2>Introducing <a href="http://bolt.com">Bolt</a>, a company dedicated to making it possible for everyone, everywhere to transact effortlessly. Bolt is – believe it or not – the world’s first end-to-end product for accepting payments online. By integrating the entire stack, we allow any retailer to provide <a href="https://www.bolt.com/fast-checkout/">fast checkout</a> to their customers with dramatically less cost and effort.We eliminate unnecessary steps like entering a billing address. And for merchants, we make order review and fraud go away with the payment industry’s first 100% zero fraud guarantee.<h2>The problem with payments</h2>Accepting payments requires assembling and maintaining your own payments infrastructure, plus a whole lot of manual work.<ul><li>5-10 separate systems to handle payment processing, fraud detection, checkout, analytics, user authentication, tax/shipping calculation, A/B testing, and more.</li><li>Engineering and product teams to implement and continually maintain a checkout flow involving multiple steps, dozens of forms, and ever-changing platforms and best-practices.</li><li>Risk and operations teams to manually review transactions for potential fraud, deal with chargebacks as they come in, and manage relationships with payment processors.</li></ul>For the maintenance and management costs – which can be in the millions – the result is poor checkout experiences and inaccurate fraud decisioning.<h2>What is Bolt?</h2><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672346070/bolt_product_1024x682_1024x682_1_fa519f2d4d.jpg" alt="bolt-product-1024x682-1024x682-1.jpg" srcset="https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672346070/thumbnail_bolt_product_1024x682_1024x682_1_fa519f2d4d.jpg 234w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672346070/small_bolt_product_1024x682_1024x682_1_fa519f2d4d.jpg 500w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672346070/medium_bolt_product_1024x682_1024x682_1_fa519f2d4d.jpg 750w,https://res.cloudinary.com/dugcmkito/image/upload/v1672346070/large_bolt_product_1024x682_1024x682_1_fa519f2d4d.jpg 1000w," sizes="100vw">Bolt is a single product that handles every aspect of payments for merchants.<ul><li>End-to-End Payment Processing</li><li>Hyper-Optimized Checkout</li><li>100% Fraud Coverage</li><li>Clear Insights &amp; Analytics</li></ul>That’s it.<h3>What does that mean for merchants?</h3><ul><li>Happier customers who repeat buy</li><li>No more fraudulent chargebacks</li><li>Zero order review overhead</li><li>Full performance transparency</li><li>Payments completely handled</li><li>A single dashboard for business analytics</li><li>24/7 premium support</li></ul><h3>Close to 100 businesses have already seen a 10%–50% lift in revenue.</h3><blockquote>Bolt merchant <a href="https://www.invictawatch.com/">Invicta Watches</a> replaced 3 separate tools — payment processing, fraud detection, and checkout — with Bolt and saw a 150% increase in sales. And they made the switch during Black Friday, the busiest time of year — a testament to Bolt’s ease of integration. See the full case study <a href="https://bolt.com/case-studies/invicta">here</a>.</blockquote>See the <a href="https://bolt.com/case-studies">case studies section of our website</a> for more.<h2>How we did it</h2>There’s no magic involved – here’s how we did it.<ul><li>We evaluated dozens of studies and A/B tested hundreds of thousands of checkouts to design the most streamlined experience possible.</li><li>We built plugins and integrations for popular ecommerce platforms so that no matter what you use, you can integrate Bolt efficiently.</li><li>From the entire shopping and payment process, we collect data that we use to train models that predict fraud much more accurately than our competitors. This allows us to provide the payment industry’s first zero fraud guarantee. For the small fraction of orders that need review, we take care of it.</li><li>We integrated the entire stack into one seamless platform. Because we control every aspect of the system, we’re able to innovate much faster than our competitors, who are bogged down with interfacing multiple components they don’t control.</li></ul>Bolt wasn’t easy to build, in fact it took many years and <a href="https://bolt.com/team">many great minds</a>, but the principle is simple: the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.<h2>The future of payments</h2>We envision a world where everyone, everywhere, is able to transact with everyone else, effortlessly. Bolt is standardizing and simplifying payments across the web. We’re eliminating fraud and allowing thousands of businesses to operate in the global market.But, this is just the beginning.Online payments today are interfaces to card networks and legacy payments infrastructure. Bitcoin and the ongoing cryptocurrency revolution, however, is creating a future where global payments become a global public utility, unencumbered by regulations and fees that limit the potential of current payment infrastructure.If the revolution goes according to plan, the future won’t need another payments company.<hr>If building the end of payments excites you, we’re hiring across all roles – see our <a href="http://bolt.com/jobs">jobs</a> page.Find additional information about our launch:<ul><li><a href="https://medium.com/@bolt.com/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-payments-2237f51fef10">Medium</a></li><li><a href="https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/23/bolt-launches-an-amazon-like-checkout-experience-for-the-rest-of-online-retail/">TechCrunch</a></li><li><a href="https://www.pymnts.com/news/retail/2018/bolt-ryan-breslow-payments-stack-ai/">PYMNTS.com</a></li><li><a href="http://www.paymenteye.com/2018/01/24/interview-bolt-co-founder-on-the-importance-of-all-in-one-integration/">PaymentEye</a></li><li><a href="https://martechtoday.com/bolts-zero-fraud-payments-platform-209817">Martech</a></li></ul>