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E-commerce will evolve next month as Amazon loses the 1-Click patent

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Re: E-commerce will evolve next month as Amazon loses the 1-Click patent

#5
Setting aside the madness that is the patent itself ever being granted, what I found most interesting on that post was that this could now (possibly) become an actual web standard in the future:

> the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has started writing a draft proposal for one click buying methods.

The W3C site itself has a number of web payment related proposals in progress[1]. The Payment Request API, in particular, looks pretty interesting (updated 2017-08-17). I wonder what a difference something like that would've made back in the day when I was bathed in Paypal SOAP.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/#tr_Web_Payments

Re: E-commerce will evolve next month as Amazon loses the 1-Click patent

#6
I ran an ecommerce company for about a year, and one click checkout was the least of our concerns when it came to Amazon.

The speed of delivery, prime benefits, brand recognition, and willingness to lose money on many if not most items are absolutely brutal to compete against.

I'm glad one click checkout will be more broadly available, but it's probably not going to make much of a difference...

Re: E-commerce will evolve next month as Amazon loses the 1-Click patent

#7
post #2

Still can't believe that this was a patent!

As someone who has a software patent, you don't want to know what it's like, as an engineer, to see your work get abstracted into generalities for a patent.

By the end of it, everything was so generically described that I couldn't even recognize it anymore. This entire system needs to be reworked or thrown away entirely.

Re: E-commerce will evolve next month as Amazon loses the 1-Click patent

#9
post #2

Still can't believe that this was a patent!

Agreed, it seems quite obvious even if there was no prior art (which I doubt, even in 1997, and security issues aside, sites using PHP or ASP or Perl could have been storing credit card data for express checkout functionality).

I also don't see the huge advantage of this. I never use one-click checkout on Amazon. I like to review everything before I buy.

I guess for totally impulse purchases it helps eliminate a step at which the buyer might reconsider a purchase. But I don't like to shop that way.

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