Not a single one had a 1-click checkout button on their product pages. Presumably, for the exact reasons you mention. I had to add items to a cart, go through an upsell modal, get to a checkout page (or some sort) and then I could click on the " Checkout" button.
It seems that the reason that no one has seen a Bolt 1-click checkout button on a product page in real life, is because it.... doesn't exist?
The one saving grace option I give them is that the behaviour may be different as someone who does not have a Bolt account. It's possible that they are tracking users, and dynamically changing the "Add to Cart" button to a 1-click checkout if I'm signed in to their system.
This behaviour would still explain why people have never seen it.
For years - YEARS - ecommerce RFPs included "one click checkout?" as a requirement, even while it was an active Amazon patent. Once the patent expired, our platform team implemented a one-click checkout feature. There's nothing fancy about it - you need a saved address and a saved payment tender, et voila. And still, the merchants would list in requirements, "One click checkout, must-have"
And I don't think even once in fifteen years of doing this did anyone ever actually use it. It helped me with demos, for sure.
In reality, Bolt and Fast weren't responding to a burning need for one-click checkout - they are (were?) responding to Shopify's locked down checkout, but they're all chasing the same greedy idea: use a "quick checkout" process to build a marketplace ecosystem, a la Amazon, and skim a percentage of every dollar in the orders that pass through them to do that, selling on the idea that quick checkout will boost sales. Which it might for some brands... but it usually doesn't have a noticeable effect.
But being a drop-shipper on a centralized marketplace is not what brands want. Amazon is, at best, an unpleasant necessity. You get a boost in sales up front, and if you make enough noise, Amazon starts selling advertising around you, and if things are going REALLY well, they spin up their own knockoff brand. With any luck, by that point you're a strong enough brand to drive people to purchase directly from your site, and then some startup comes around suggesting they can give you a better checkout experience than Shopify... and as you hear the pitch, it's transparent that they're just doing the same brand-erosion thing as Amazon and Shopify, and that erodes trust.
For a shoe company, they realize that most people buy one pair at a time, so while they hope they can upsell you some shoe-shine they realise that their possibility to expand the cart is pretty low. I imagine one-click could work well for them.
A RC parts store on the other hand, there is huge room for cart expansion there. If you just sell someone an RC plane in one click, they may not even be able to use it without more purchases. They'll be wanting to add a receiver, some batteries, spare props etc.
- 1-Click used to be patent protected until 2017. It may very well be possible that the news of the patent expiration didn't reach everyone, or that people are still afraid of patent trolls.
- unlike Amazon which has the payment and shipping information on file for every customer (which many people are), a random web shop selling sneakers won't, so the user has to go through the checkout process anyway.
These might be up-sell or cart expansion opportunities. When a purchase is complete the user is likely to bounce.
But if you click "add to cart" and you're presented with similar items, related suggestions, etc. Then maybe you shop around more, add a half dozen items to your cart as you go.
On the other hand maybe you add it to your cart, look around a bit more, but have time to rethink the purchase and bail before completion.
I'd guess some research has been done to shed light on the behavioral patterns, but they're also going to be highly specific to different product segments. If you're shopping for 2 or 3 new shirts you might be easily be persuaded into a 4th. But if it's cell phones then you're done after the first one, and you already know if you want a case or not so accessory upsells above & beyond the buyer's original intentions are probably more limited.