Fast has a plan to reinvent online shopping. And then kill the password.
Domm Holland is only just now launching his product, but he has his mythical founding story down pat. It goes like this: Holland was watching his wife's grandmother try to order groceries online during the pandemic, and he saw her struggling to figure out the checkout process. Entering credit cards, setting up accounts, typing your delivery address over and over and over again: It's all just way harder than it needs to be. Right then and there, Holland likes to say, he decided to fix it.
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What "fixing it" looks like is Fast, a one-click checkout system for the entire internet that Holland, his co-founder Allison Barr Allen, and their team launched on Wednesday. With one button, Fast is hoping to change the way people buy online. "Fast is really uniformly available to the world," Holland said. "Every consumer, every seller, every platform, every device, every card." That, he believes, is how you make it easier for everyone to buy things online.
The first time a customer clicks on the Fast Checkout button (and suddenly it becomes obvious why Holland and Barr Allen picked that name), they'll be asked to type in basic buying-stuff details. Name, address, credit card information, that sort of thing. Checkout will feel fairly normal, that first time. But Fast uses cookies, IP addresses and other information to track users on a device, and their email to track them across devices. And so, every time after that, as long as the user is on the same device, checking out takes exactly one click. When they click or tap on Fast Checkout, it shares those previously stored details with the merchant, runs through the purchasing process, and finishes automatically.
Fast's co-founders are the first to admit that they're not reinventing the checkout wheel. Amazon offers one-click purchasing, and in apps like WeChat it's a universal feature. But these are closed systems, offering simplicity and synergy only inside their own platforms and apps. Fast's plan is to make all of that convenience available to everyone everywhere.
As the Fast team sees it, they have only one apples-to-apples competitor: PayPal. But they're not worried about PayPal. "It's a bit slow and not the most intuitive user experience," Barr Allen said. Fast, she said, is what PayPal might look like if PayPal were invented in 2020 and not last century.
Beyond the outdated current state of things, "the problem is that your data is stored in a really siloed way with each company," Barr Allen said. "That's why autofill doesn't always work with your credit card, it's why you have to fill out forms over and over again." It's even worse on mobile, which is where online commerce increasingly happens, and where filling out long forms is even more arduous. That's why Zack Fleishman, the COO of Shark Wheel, said he signed up for Fast in the first place. "People get phone calls, they get appointment reminders — if they can't execute a transaction immediately, you're going to end up with a lot of abandoned carts."
At its most basic, Fast is just automating all the form-filling. It still shares all user data with merchants, other than the 16 digits of their credit card. "We don't act as the seller's customer database," Holland said. "We just inject the customer into their database faster and easier than they ever have." Their pitch to merchants is simple: We make it easy to buy stuff, and when it's easy to buy stuff, more people tend to do so.
The company has been making that pitch loudly and constantly over the last few months. Fast has been cold-contacting retailers, has been more or less ubiquitous in tech Twitter circles, and has attempted to build the kind of hype you wouldn't ordinarily associate with checkout software. On day one, it'll be in the BigCommerce app store and available to all Stripe merchants, along with a handful of launch partners.
From a merchant perspective, Fast is in the middle of two competing trends. More large retailers are building their own payment systems, hoping to own more of the sales process (and more of the customer data). On the other hand, though, there's now a long line of successful ways to offload the hassle of managing and processing payments. Stripe's the best example (and the largest investor in Fast), but from Affirm to Klarna to the Apple Pay and Google Pay and Everything Else Pay buttons showing up all over the web, retailers are happy to trade a bit of control and customer data for simplifying the sales process down to a single click.
Ultimately, Fast imagines a lot more happening within that one click. In the long run, Fast isn't really a checkout company: It's an identity company. It goes back to when Barr Allen was at Uber, thinking about how to manage and validate the identities of every driver and rider on the platform. "What I was looking for was basically an identity API," she said, and that just didn't exist. But it should. "If you're moving homes, why do you have to update your address in 500 places? You should just update it in one place, and then every business just pulls that information to have the most up-to-date information."
When buyers click on the Fast Checkout button, they're effectively also creating an account with that retailer, with no username or password necessary. Of course, here, too, Fast is not the only company thinking along these lines. Sign In With Google/Facebook/Twitter/Apple buttons are a staple of the internet now, as long lists of usernames and passwords give way to The One True Account that manages all the rest. Beyond even that, a running theory in tech circles holds that the internet would be better if it had been built with an identity layer, in which users control and share their personal data from a single store. Even Tim Berners-Lee himself is working on a new kind of internet that starts with identity.
Starting with checkout is a means to an end for Fast, but also a clever shortcut. "It's a lot more boring to say to users, 'Hey, we're building an identity API, can you go to our website and give us some information?'" Holland said. "The attraction for that is a lot lower than saying, 'Hey, next time you want to buy a T-shirt or groceries, you could do it in one click.'" People happily give up most of their relevant personal information in the checkout process anyway, so Fast can accomplish everyone's goals all at once. And it's true that login and checkout are inextricably linked, and the only way to do one-click checkout is to solve both problems together.
By combining login and checkout, Fast becomes a powerful tool in online shopping. It can show all of a user's purchases from all over the web, track their deliveries, simplify reordering and returns, and more. Users can see all that stuff in the Fast app.
If Fast can become as ubiquitous as it hopes, it would become an unparalleled source of shopping information and personal data. Holland said the company has no interest in selling this data to advertisers — "absolutely not, it's just not our model" — and that Fast makes its money by charging a fraction of sales that run through Fast, not by selling ads. Still, Fast does see a huge opportunity in personalizing the shopping experience. "We'll have data about more than just how much you spend at a store," Barr Allen said, "and to be able to use this data to provide personalized, better experiences for consumers is where we also see a huge opportunity."
One challenge for Fast will be convincing users to give up this kind of shopping data to another platform and convincing retailers to do the same. Just as Netflix steadfastly refuses to let other companies see who's watching what on Netflix, most retailers carefully guard data about how their shoppers shop. Fast wants to be part of the retail experience without owning it or taking it over, but that's a tricky line to walk.
For now, though, Fast just wants to be everywhere. Or, at least, everywhere on the web. In-app shopping is a much thornier problem (and a smaller market), so that'll come later. It wants a Fast Checkout button on every retailer's site on the internet, with the promise that nobody can get sales done faster. On the flip side, Fast is betting that obviating credit card numbers and address forms can make it an indispensable part of the shopping experience. And once it knows everyone, it becomes an indispensable part of the internet altogether.