What is going on with one-click checkouts?
What is going on with one-click checkouts?
This week Adyen launched Click to Pay, a way for consumers to pay with a previously stored card.
This technology is based on the Secure Remote Commerce (SRC) solution from Visa and Mastercard via the EMVCo organisation that provides the framework.
Basically, if you have shopped at a Shopify store before and used Shop Pay (the second best checkout product on the market IMO), this is the same concept but done at the card network level.
The history of these different one-click checkout solutions is somewhat confusing and I spent more time than I care to admit going down a rabbit hole. Here is a quick timeline
August 2013 - Shopify Payments launches, powered by Stripe
January 2013 - Stripe launched “Checkout”, its payment form overlay, originally part of its “Button” product
Early 2014 - Stripe added “Remember Me”, a one click checkout experience with a Stripe token to save card for future use
April 2017 - Shop Pay launched, its one click checkout feature, with no mention of Stripe (press release)
June 2019 - Stripe relaunched "Checkout" as a hosted payments page and did not mention its one click checkout feature
2020 - Stripe invested in Fast
April 2021 - Stripe relaunched its one click checkout as “Link with Stripe”
March/April 2022 - Stripe rebranded and spun out “Link with Stripe” simply as “Link”
Back in 2014, Stripe added a one click checkout feature to its “Checkouts”product which can generate a Stripe token and a 2FA step up to remember these details for future use to save typing them in again.
But as of June 2019, the “Checkout” product no longer featured this “Remember Me” function and had been fully rebranded as an hosted checkout page that exists today. Possibly this one click checkout feature remained live but I was not able to find it.
Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison himself in 2021 acknowledged that it was temporarily deprecated but didn’t say why.
My working theory is that Shopify’s Shop Pay is a white-labelled version of the Stripe product and they had an exclusive deal on it at some point, which has now run out and was the cause of Stripe removing it. (p.s. If this is not news to you, its probably not worth reading much further as I went down somewhat of a rabbit hole.)
I admit that the launch of Shop Pay in 2017 and the disappearance of the feature from Stripe’s Checkout product page only later in 2019 doesn’t exactly line up but it could still be true if Stripe was not accepting any new customers for its one click checkout feature.
In the launch of Shopify Payments in 2013, Stripe was mentioned as the underlying payments provider but not when Shopify launched its own one click checkout solution Shop Pay in 2014. What Shopify built themselves for this vs what is white-labelled Stripe is not clear to me.
In 2020 Stripe went on to invest in Fast which had a competing product but shut down in April 2022 which roughly coincided with the latest rebranding of Stripe’s one click checkout solution “Link”
I have always espoused Shop Pay as the second best checkout experience online (after Apple Pay) and thought it was a great product launch. But it might just be all Stripe underneath after all and therefore kudos also belongs to Stripe.
I recognise that I went down a complete rabbit hole for this post and potentially discovered something that a lot of people already knew; that Shop Pay is Stripe’s Link product in disguise.
Regardless, I enjoyed the digging nonetheless. With the push of Visa and Mastercard into the one click checkout space with SRC / Click to Pay, I expect more to come.
The winner needs to have the most seamless experience for users and the broadest adoption for merchants.
The battle for the checkout page is far from over.
It is the same but like you said, uses network tokens instead of acquirer tokens.
Currently a merchant can ask a user to save the card (using processor tokens) which can be used to offer one click checkout to such users who has a card saved on file.
How is SRC same or different from this (other than probably using network tokens)