One-Click Checkout Companies Don't Exist

May 13th, 2022

One-Click Checkout
Companies Don't Exist

By Albert Saniger, Founder & CEO at nate

Portrait of Albert Saniger, Founder and CEO of nate

‍It’s hard to ignore the headlines in tech right now about one-click checkout companies, Bolt, and Fast. In fact, I keep getting the same question over and over. Is nate a one-click checkout company? I guess the question is understandable, because the nate app does offer one-click purchasing. But the answer is also simple, and frequently misunderstood.

nate is not a one-click checkout company. In fact, there is no such thing. One-click checkout is a feature. It’s a great feature, but a feature nonetheless.

At nate, we want to provide a service that delivers a holistic answer to how the modern consumer wants to shop and pay.

In e-commerce, companies are attempting to increase the ease by which consumers purchase products – sometimes with a simple tap of a button. But the business models of these companies often differ.

In one business model, software companies sell their product into businesses. They offer retailers conversion upside through a reduction in friction for the consumer, point-of-sale financing, or shipping insurance. These companies are aligning with the interests of the seller in order to move more product.

On the flip side, other companies make money when they provide value to the consumer.

Imagine you have a rewards credit card that works at less than 1% of retailers. It’s great in theory, if you can use it… but you almost never can. Would consumers adopt that product? Probably not. You’d need to grab a whole lot of market share in order to really make an impact on the consumer experience, and that’s how I see the enterprise approach to simplifying checkout. There’s no winner-take all here. It took PayPal 15 years to integrate with the top 700 retailers in the non-Amazon economy. In the meantime, consumers continue to shift more of their share-of-wallet to Amazon, which up until now was the only alternative for a decent level of aggregation and simplicity.

No shade to anyone selling software to retailers though. I have the utmost respect for founders building in this space, trying to make e-commerce vastly more efficient. However, when we built nate, we decided to align with the consumer because we saw a way to offer more value, more quickly. We allow shoppers to aggregate all their non-Amazon purchases in a single app, giving them payment flexibility, data privacy, and the ability to share shopping lists with friends and gift with a simple text.

It’s the world’s first universal shopping app with the seamless, social, and private e-commerce payments aggregation that consumers deserve.
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an online shopper sharing a product to the nate app

Our business is both a payments business and a platform business. The payments business makes money when people buy things. We issue cards for every purchase and therefore capture a share of the interchange when those cards are charged. The platform business makes money when people share shopping lists with friends and followers. We have agreements with affiliate networks and we make sure to share our earnings with the creators of those lists. These two businesses combined mean our net revenue is orders of magnitude larger than what retailers are willing to pay for conversion upside. That’s a very decent amount of free cash given nate is a business without inventory or supply-side restrictions.

Especially when building a payments business, you have a choice to make: do you represent the seller or do you represent the buyer? The nate app is built for buyers, not sellers. It’s the world’s first universal shopping app with the seamless, social, and private e-commerce payments aggregation that consumers deserve.

And it’s so much more than one-click checkout. Of course, consumers do want to buy with one click – but they want a lot more than that. Most of all, they want the ease that comes with aggregation. Aggregation happened in music with Spotify. It happened in food with Doordash. It happened in transportation with Uber. And it’s happening right now in e-commerce with nate.

With the nate app, you can skip the checkout and consolidate all your purchases in one app. Publicly available discounts are auto-applied, privacy cards are issued for every purchase, and payment flexibility isn’t restricted based on the retailer’s capabilities. You can pay now or pay later–anywhere you shop on the internet, anytime you want.

In the last 12 months, nate shoppers have made purchases across 30,000 different online stores (and counting). Fashion, beauty, wellness, electronics, books, furniture. We wanted to create an app where the consumer could buy anything. Really, anything. Just tap share, tap nate, tap buy.

We love a good one-click checkout feature. But it’s just a feature. At nate, we want to provide a service that delivers a holistic answer to how the modern consumer wants to shop and pay – by aggregating online purchases, making the e-comm experience social, delivering top-notch privacy, and offering payment flexibility. Next time you’re itching to buy something online, just nate it.