rbres

Right. There are a lot of elements of ecommerce success. Building a compelling online storefront, for instance, is a big one (thus Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, Demandware, WooCommerce, etc).

We're not here to solve everything around online commerce, at least not yet, But, the payments stack (checkout, fraud, internationalization, etc) is really difficult and results in substantial lost revenue. By helping convert 10%-50% more orders, we help businesses grow faster. That's our very simple goal.

Agreed that Amazon is actually not the best at checkout, especially on mobile. What we're referencing is the fact that Amazon is able to invest $100M's and 100s of engineers into optimizing the checkout experience. Others really struggle. And, there are hundreds of things you can do to optimize checkout. Here's one study with examples: https://baymard.com/checkout-usability

We do all those things. We invest the engineering resources to perfect checkout so that you don't have to. Even our checkout today is not perfect, but it's way better than the one's we replace. And will continue to improve with every deploy.

"Amazon-like" can be a bit confusing. Really it appeals to our vision to help every online business compete with Amazon by optimizing their payments flows. And hopefully even create a superior-to-Amazon experience.

Not all press pieces are perfect. Admittedly, the before/after graphic is not great. Go see real-world examples of checkout here and visit the sites: https://bolt.com/case-studies

Less fields, less time to complete checkout, 10%-50% higher completion rates (some merchants seeing over 150% higher completion rates).

Yes, absolutely.

CEO of Bolt here. Browser autofill is a very detectable pattern, amongst hundreds of other patterns that all become elements of a broader fraud model. This broader fraud model doesn't only incorporate behavioral features, but literally hundreds of other features around order details, personal details, shipping info.

May smell like BS (a lot of companies in this space are full of BS). But, we spent 3 years building a world-class data ingestion & ML engine which we'll describe more in future blog posts. And our case studies (https://bolt.com/case-studies) with more to come demonstrate the type of results we're able to achieve.

It's not zero sum if you have overall greater precision. We believe we do and have proven it across dozens of case studies.

As we publish more, we hope to let data talk. If I were in your shoes, I'd be similarly skeptical. Most companies in the space overpromise and underdeliver.

Thanks jv22222! Much appreciated. Transparency, positivity, and truth is our north star.

Will shoot ya a ping.

We pay the cost on behalf of the merchant.

On the pricing page? What exactly happens when you click it?

Nothing in adult for now. I'm not sure what "those currently operating in the unknown" means.

Hoping to expand to more business categories as we grow.

Hey dawhizkid - totally right.

Some comments on that in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216682

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216936

We vet our merchants before onboarding and make sure to work with high-integrity companies. We monitor orders not just for identity fraud, but for merchant / collusion fraud.

That being said, we can certainly make mistakes. We also end up in the red some months with some clients. The good thing is that when we make a mistake, we pay the cost, not the merchant (which is contrary to the current state of the industry).

We have made reasonable profit per client even with our costs, but the real winners are our clients driving millions in newfound revenue.

Big fans of crypto. I co-started the Stanford Bitcoin Group back in the day. Dropped out of school to re-engineer online payments originally inspired by crypto.

We realized crypto's shortcomings in mainstream payments (after a valiant year long quest) when we also had an aha-moment about how to re-engineer traditional online payments. Thus, the Bolt you see today.

News on crypto for online payments to come :-)

Our old, hidden URL site, had the slanted style for the last 2+ years before their redesign: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qM3lAjCdSuTPAU-R9S2THrD83Zd...

Is pretty consistent with our style today.

Yes! Shoot us an email: jobs [at] bolt.com

Looking into this thanks.

We cap it at low absolute single digit percentages. Business capture way more upside than we do.

True. But it's zero fraud from your perspective as a business.

You also have full control over false positives: - First, we put txn's through several layers to ensure the highest rates of order approvals. If our algorithm is about to reject, it goes through a human review process to ensure we're approving as much as possible. - If we reject, you have a force approve time window to approve transactions if you disagree with our decision. You have final decision-making. None of our merchants use this because they end up trusting us so much :-)

Our customers (some case studies here: https://bolt.com/case-studies) have switched from top-tier providers and seen substantial order approval lift.

Furthermore, we're also your payment processor. Typically fraud providers and payment processors are separate, so if fraud providers make a mistake, payment processors will slap the merchant on the wrist with what can ultimately be serious fines + more reserve requirements. We don't, because we're also your processor.

Here are some case studies to prove it: https://bolt.com/case-studies

Many of our clients switched from top-tier fraud detection providers and saw significant lift in order approvals with Bolt.

More case studies on the way.

Spot on.

Not exactly. Friendly fraud is when a customer is a clear bad actor and, even though they receive the goods/services, they claim they didn't.

Merchant-fault is typically behind many of the non-friendly-fraud and non-stolen-card-fraud chargebacks. This includes late shipments, not adhering to return policies, damaged goods, etc.

Makes sense.

And yea thanks, the site auto-redirects to HTTPS.

We never auto-reject, and we already do human review. Forgot to mention that.

At the bottom of https://bolt.com/fraud

"MACHINE POWERED, HUMAN REVIEWED"

"Everything we do at Bolt is tailored to maximize your order approval rates. Purely algorithmic systems falsely reject good customers. Every suspicious order goes through an extra layer of human review to ensure the best results."

Good question. Addressed that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216455

Our top focus is order approval lift. Zero fraud is cool and all (and makes for a good posting title) but is really just an assurance that you should be comfortable as we start to approve way more orders.

Right now, we don't cover friendly fraud. The reason is that it's largely out of our control. We can't control how well merchants communicate with clients, how fast/reliably they ship, etc. So if we covered it, it lowers the cost of treating customers poorly. There will always be a bad actor here or there, but that's typically less than 1% of chargebacks (at least from our data).

Here's why we exist: https://bolt.com/case-studies

Most fraud detection systems rely on blocking rules. So they'd detect a VPN/Tor and combined with an international order, it'd be an almost guaranteed block.

We'd factor this in, and it may be negative, but if the other 198 variables match up, you'll be in good shape with Bolt given your purchase behavior, on-page event patters, order details, and many other factors that are much better predictors of fraud than VPN/Country/etc.

Absolutely, more than happy to :-)

Amazon is currently able to invest $100M's and 100s of engineers into perfecting the checkout experience. There are actually hundreds of things you can do to optimize checkout. Here's one study: https://baymard.com/checkout-usability

We do all those things. We invest the engineering resources to perfect checkout. So that you don't have to. Even our checkout today is not perfect, but it's way better than the one's we replace. And will continue to improve with every deploy.

Now that you say it, Amazon-like can be a bit confusing. Really it appeals to our vision to help every online business compete with checkout by optimizing their payments flows.

It's pretty insane.

Empirically, you'd rather let several fraudsters through in order to not trap a good customer (because of their customer lifetime value, brand value, etc).

However, the industry does the opposite. They'll reject 3 good customers to catch 1 fraudster. It's really bad.

Every switch to Bolt has seen a 1%-20% lift in order approval rates (while guaranteeing zero fraud) because of our unique data engine and data visibility. Huge reason why companies are switching to Bolt.

Good question. Definitely need to add to the site.

You can accept a credit card from anywhere in the world. We also support 50+ localized currencies.

However, we can only settle to a US/Canadian bank account. We can do an instant transfer to an intl bank account, but some companies don't want funds touching the US/Canada for tax reasons.

If you are ok with that on the settlement side, you're in good shape! Adding more settlement countries and local acquiring is a top priority for the next year.

Thanks brod!

Main differences:

- Stripe = APIs to build your own payment stack.

- Bolt = fully out of the box payments stack. Checkout that doesn't only do payments but also shipping/tax/user-auth. Also w/ 100% fraud coverage.

Also to set the record a bit more clearly: we launched in stealth 1.5 years ago, have been moving $100Ms, and have dozens of case studies.

Appreciate the kind words too!