What Fast Means for Brands
One-click checkout to capture sales faster
If you’re building an online store, the options are overwhelming: Shopify, Squarespace, Big Cartel, BigCommerce, Spree Commerce… and the list goes on. When it’s time to get paid, you can use PayPal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and similarly, it’s seems that the providers are endless. Fast, which launched last week, hopes to simplify payments for both businesses and customers.
One button to rule them all
Domm Holland and the team founded Fast in March 2019 and per Crunchbase, received funding in a November 2019 seed round led by Index Ventures and a Series A round of $20 million led by Stripe this past March. Fast is payments platform culminating in a singular button allowing customers to check out with the click of one button; think Amazon’s one-click ordering. Fast hopes to make this convenience available everywhere.
To be able to use the Fast button, users complete a form from Fast that encrypts shoppers’ data and then the user can use Fast at any retailer that partners with the company.
Fast initially launched with BigCommerce, who has over 60,000 merchants using its platform. Fast says its goal is to process every payment on the internet.
Competing with Amazon
The clear leader in e-commerce, Amazon, has lots of businesses coming for its title. Fairly-new tools (mainly Shopify and Square) have let retailers inexpensively transform their business to an online storefront that can utilize paid social advertising to gain customers beyond their home geography. Prior to these innovations, companies would have had to spend extreme amounts of money to build an online infrastructure to compete with Amazon and other big-box retailer sites.
Fast is the new tool that helps create e-commerce experiences that compete with Amazon’s fast and convenient one-click ordering. And that’s a big deal.
As e-commerce continues to grow — and rapidly through coronavirus — the importance of a strong infrastructure grows. Amazon was so overloaded with demand at the start of the pandemic that they experienced slowed shipments, out-of-stock essential items, and actually lost market share.
Fast’s technology may be able to reduce the number of abandoned carts and persuade shoppers to buy from independent sites rather than Amazon. Fast also boasts industry-leading security measures and e-commerce specialists to help retailers.
Fast may prove to be another major asset to give small shops a leg up in offering better service and products in the ongoing fight against Amazon and other large e-commerce sites.
