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.
> the patent will expire and the technology behind it will be free to be used by any e-commerce site
particularly specious. There is no "technology" behind it. It was a concept or busines process that the vaguaries of patent law deemed worthy of rewarding.
Not to mention that any technology ("source code") Amazon used to implement the patent will remain under copyright essentially indefinitely.
They're saying that, unlike usual patents, the content of the one-click patent filing does not serve as a useful basis for anyone else's implementation of a one-click shopping cart. This is the whole point of patents: to publicize a trade-secret process in exchange for protection. If your patent can't be used by your competitors to (make it easier to) start doing the thing you're doing, then you didn't really file a patent.
The one-click patent has an implementation, but the implementation is so trivial that there are only two things you can do with it: either copy it wholesale, or write your own based on the same idea (which will have nothing in common with the original because they're both too small to "share DNA" like that.) In this case, you can't copy wholesale, because copyright. So you're stuck writing from scratch. At that point, the patent has given you no advantage in implementation over the simple knowledge that a process for doing X exists at all.
Exactly. If the teachings in the patent aren't necessary or even useful to future developers, then what was the point of granting a 20-year monopoly in the first place? No research expenses needed to be recouped, and there was never any danger that some arcane knowledge would be locked away forever as a trade secret.
Many patents don't reward the first person who solves a given problem, so much as they reward the first person to encounter a given problem. That person adopts a trivial, obvious solution and the USPTO cheerfully rubber-stamps it at everyone else's expense. This was clearly one of those patents. It cost Amazon essentially nothing to research, nothing to develop, and nothing to implement, but the rewards were immense.
> At that point, the patent has given you no advantage in implementation over the simple knowledge that a process for doing X exists at all.
This depends on whether you consider X to be "converting ecommerce sales" or "ordering items with a single click". Just because the implementation is easy to reverse engineer from a one line description of the novelty doesn't diminish the resources spent by Amazon in coming up with this insight and testing how it improved their business.
I'm not strongly in favour of software patents in general, but the argument that this patent is "too easy to copy" misses the point a bit.
I think the comment is both quibbling about semantics (the article used the term "technology" overly broadly because the value of the one-click idea isn't in the implementation but really just in the concept) but I think also voices a legitimate complaint.
The same failure of understanding that caused the author of that blog post to misidentify Amazon's one click patent as being related to a "technology" rather than just an idea is also behind the patent office's troubling tendency to issue patents to other ideas. Advocates for patent reform make a convincing case that issuing patent protection to ideas like this actually harms innovation more than it fosters it.
The fact that the actual implementation (technology) of the one click shopping idea, the source code, is protected by copyright is true but isn't particularly relevant. And to answer your second question, copyright prevents anyone from using Amazon's particular one-click source code, but that's largely irrelevant, since it's an idea that can be implemented a million ways, which is a major reason that many people feel it shouldn't be eligible for patent protection.
I don't think it's a quibble. I think it's a point about what even makes sense to be patentable. The expiration of the patent frees up exactly zero technology.
Business process can be considered a technology, i.e. technical procedure. Also, since they got the patent, wouldn't they have to pass tests for previous works, novelty, and obviousness?
And, why shouldn't something be patentable, just because it's easy to replicate?
Lots of things become easy to replicate after they've been done once, despite being non-obvious before. The "no obvious inventions" part of patent law is supposed to prevent people from patenting things that are already broadly used (or small variations on things that are already broadly used). The cliched example being that you can't patent the wheel.
Edit: I see that Animats has covered this much better elsewhere in the thread.
> Lots of things become easy to replicate after they've been done once, despite being non-obvious before
Maybe, but this is not why we have patents.
Patents justification is to help innovations to spread, by making them public and, in exchange, granting a monopoly for some time as would have been the case should the innovation been kept secret.
Patents are not, in theory, a bonus for whoever implement something first.
In practice though, this seems to be largely the case, at least in software, that patents are like those mine field maps during the gold rushes, partitioning the hills and delimiting every tiny area belonging to one miner, probably to police what would otherwise be a violent, perpetual quarrel.
I used the Payment Request API in a project and it was great. Chrome currently has it implemented for Android, you call a JavaScript function, a prompt appears asking the user if they'd like to pay, they enter the security code and hit pay.
All this feature actually does it give you the users credit card, phone number, and billing/shipping addresses. You still have to give that information to someone like Stripe.
They're focusing on mobile since that is where the checkout experience is the most painful. https://ride.lyft.com has it implemented if you want to check it out.
> All this feature actually does it give you the users credit card, phone number, and billing/shipping addresses. You still have to give that information to someone like Stripe.
I used to sit on the working group for Payment Request - the primary intention of Payment Request is to get rid of checkout forms and parallel implementations of the same logic. Right now most for most implementations that means credit card entry, but the standard is designed to support any type of payment.
So if I'm running an eCommerce site and want to support PayPal, Apple Pay, and Android Pay I shouldn't need to implement three discrete SDKs and APIs - I can instead implement Payment Request (although you'll still need to process the payment information output by each of those payment mechanisms separately. Ultimately for many merchants the implementation of Payment Request will be abstracted away by their payment processor, such as Stripe).
However, there is a parallel standard to Payment Request, called Payment Handler, which is designed to allow third party payment providers to write service-worker-esque plugins to browsers to take payment directly. They're intended to work together, but it's possible for a browser to implement just Payment Request to replace autofill if they so choose.
There's also a lot of other work going on at the W3C around payment, but Payment Request and Payment Handler have the most support from browser vendors and are as such the most actively developed.
Well, they are trying to undercut Chinese with web payments, one part why mobile payments took off so well in China is because Tencent and Alibaba took out browser makers out of the equation.
If you open a website that requests your Visa or MasterCard CC data in any Tencent product, it will be blocked unless "their special hack proof API" is used. And yes, they blocked apple pay too
> Well, they are trying to undercut Chinese with web payments
Alibaba are very active participants on the Payment Request Working Group. I'm not sure they can undercut themselves. You will find several very large Chinese companies taking part: https://www.w3.org/2004/01/pp-impl/83744/status
On my memory, they were very very anxious about anything with capacity to subplant zhifubao. Paypal famously had a one click payment plugin for China, and it got banned by Alibaba nearly instantaneously.
Paypal later banned Alibaba from using Paypal outside of China
Eons past, the HTTP status code 402 was reserved for future use; "Payment Required".
Please to god W3C, take 402 and make it part of that standard! I so wish for us all to be able to respond 402 and have a simple standard way to charge.
Payment Request is a JS / client-side API (it's all about getting payment information from the browser to the website), so HTTP codes don't really come into it.
However, there's a proposed server/HTTP specification that does include it. It lacks the same broad support that Payment Request has, so is still in quite an early stage of development - https://www.w3.org/TR/webpayments-http-api/
This is what GNU Taler [0] does. You can send additional headers[1] to decide how the payment will be processed, such as X-Taler-Contract-Url and X-Taler-Offer-Url
Because if an "invention" is obvious it isn't patentable ( http://www.bitlaw.com/source/35usc/103.html ), and many many people see this as being far too obvious to be patentable.
"Obvious" for patentability purposes means obvious in advance, not obvious in hindsight. Before Amazon, nobody had one-click purchasing. They wanted people to sign up, to fill out forms with irrelevant info, and "engage with the customer". After Amazon, many people wanted one-click. That means it wasn't "obvious to one skilled in the art" in advance. For patentability purposes, the best way to demonstrate non-obviousness is to show that lots of people have worked on the problem and didn't get it right. The one-click patent meets that test.
Amazon's real innovation was combining one-click ordering with easy order cancellation for a few minutes after the order. This makes enabling one-click ordering low-risk. Many on-line sales operations still don't get this, as I mentioned the last time this came up on HN. Most shopping cart programs have a built-in attitude of "We have your money now, muhaaa haaa". Yes, you can "contact customer service to cancel." ("Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed... Due to unusually high call volume...")
Now the people who don't get this will implement one-click ordering without easy cancellation and anger their customers.
Thanks! That's what I was looking for. Many things we take for granted, which are so simple and obvious, are not obvious at all when they don't exist... I remember exactly those experiences everywhere - you have to register to add an item to a shopping card... And yes, you MUST give us your mother's maiden name...
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...
I use amazon for many of the reasons you listed - but the first thing I do on a new device is turn off 1-click. I can't see this patent changing the game for anyone.
On the other hand, many more people actually do use 1-click.
A tip: if you ever find yourself saying "why does a company have X feature/product, I don't use it, no one uses it!" you might be right on the first statement but you're almost certainly wrong on the second.
Of course - if nobody used it Amazon would remove the button. I doubt that adding 1-click to some other site will greatly increase their sales - that is all I'm saying.
Yes, but adding 1-click also inserts an extra semi-step into every purchase: the choice of whether to click the 1-click button or the add to cart button.
Apparently Amazon finds that adding 1-click does more good than harm.
Like the article said, Apple licensed the 1-click patent from Amazon in order to offer the same frictionless experience to iTunes shoppers. This was for music sales, before the iPhone was even a thing, if memory serves me right.
Well since we're using anecdotal evidence, I would certainly buy from more stores if they had one click. There have been countless times I've abandoned a shopping cart because there was too many steps
Amazon didn't start out as an online retail behemoth. There was a time when that patent made them more competitive, especially in the early years of the online shopping experience.
Amazon forces 1-click use in places like Kindle and Video purchases. I find this is a detriment if I want to purchase multiple things from these areas since each results in a credit card charge and too many similar charges or too little time between will result in my card getting flagged and locked out.
I love paper books, I love seeing them in my shelf, but since I bought a Kindle I just stopped buying paper books. It is just too easy to buy a kindle book with one click.
The process goes like this, someone recommends a book in HN, they provide an Amazon link, I read a couple of reviews, at this point I'm convinced about buying the book or not, or even if I'm not totally convinced, the price, and the easiness of just one click makes me do it. That process has increased the amount of books I read per year. Sure the button is only a small part of that, but I think is an esencial part, I think Walmart can get a lot of benefit from this.
Would you buy less books if you had to click a confirmation window?
It's much easier to buy books when you don't need to wait for delivery, unpack, carry around, get up to get them, etc. But your process already consist of several clicks and waiting for many pages.
People may self-report "no", but the evidence is abundant that at the margin, the answer is "yes". You are some probably-some-single-digit percentage less likely to buy. That matters very little to you as an individual, it can be life-or-death for a retailer.
>>Would you buy less books if you had to click a confirmation window?
Isn't it well-documented that the more steps you have during th purchase process, the lower your conversion rates? I'm sure this is especially true at Amazon's scale.
To be specific though, if I'm on my phone and I see a confirmation window, I might postpone the purchase until I'm in front of my computer - and by then I might forget about it. One click purchase completely bypasses these types of scenarios.
Better yet, you can download a sample and defer buying until you get to the end of the sample. That way you don't have to worry about books piling up that you don't get around to reading. It's a handy "books I want to read" list.
I'm kind of the same. I would definitely kill to be able to buy DRM-free epub books from someone else other than Amazon and have it 1-click integrate with my kindle.
Maybe some epub sellers could email it to your kindle with 1-click purchasing now?
I see e-books as a fee for a one time read. I'm not likely to read them again and I can't hand it to my neighbor to borrow. A paper book - I can read it, donate it, lend it out - whatever. I do like how many e-books can fit in my pocket, but I'm finding fewer reasons to buy them and more reasons to own the book instead of owning the right to view the book on some specific platform.
A lot of people don't realize (or maybe care?) that Amazon makes up a fair amount of that loss from screwing over distributors and third party sellers.
The Walmart of the Internet, I suppose.
FWIW I usually try to find more direct sources before buying on Amazon. If the other source can drop a few bucks off the Amazon price and offer free shipping I'll buy it direct from them.
Amazon Prime's fees are quite small compared to direct shipping costs with carriers. It depends on the product type, of course, but typically third-party sellers are already on thin margins selling on Amazon. It's very likely that "drop a few bucks off the Amazon price and offer free shipping" means they're selling to you at a loss.
I'm not generally in a rush; if they can get it here in a week or two that's fine as long as they tell me what day it'll be here.
I'm not saying it's a great deal for the company, but what can you expect consumers to do if Amazon has the cheapest price AND prime shipping you already paid for?
That said some companies at least raise their prices on purpose when posting to Amazon in order to meet their standards for things like returns and Prime shipping.
You say this like it's somehow a bad thing? Amazon has built an extremely efficient distribution network comprised of all major shipping companies and a vast array of third party sellers. The price you're seeing is the result of billions of dollars of investment paying off.
Most of the time I'm not in a rush, but I still pick 2-day Prime because it gets delivered to my door by UPS or sometimes FedEx. If I select slower shipping or order from another site it might come USPS or SurePost (handed off to the USPS). Best case with USPS is it ends up in the mail box down the road - worst case I have to drive to town and get it at the post office.
If Amazon would let me pick a slow option that was still UPS/Fedex, I'd do it. Same with other sites, sometimes I won't buy from them if they only ship USPS and I know it won't fit in the box.
For me, Prime is great because it means most thing come to my door at no extra (other than the yearly fee) cost.
I stopped shopping at Wal-Mart around 2009. When I returned to the US in 2012, I saw Amazon as the new Wal-Mart and stopped shopping there.
I realize Target and Kroger probably implement the same tactics as WM now, same with eBay/Newegg sellers and Amazon, so I realize it's more symbolic than anything.
Do you have good resources in mind on Walmart's harmful practices? Yes, I can search internet but looking for long sophisticated essays or even good books on the topic that you may have come across.
I am not from US but currently studying here and haven't thought much about this topic. Walmart, Walgreen and Amazon feel too convenient. I would love to learn more on the topic before it becomes a habit.
You don't avoid shopping at Walmart because of "Walmart's harmful practices". You avoid shopping at Walmart because you're better than the kind of people who shop at Walmart. Then you start talking about Walmart's harmful practices to try to confuse other people.
This wikipedia page[1] is a good start. In particular the last section about dead peasants insurance is the first story I encountered about Walmart's harmful practices.
> Critics, as well as the United States Internal Revenue Service, charge that the company was trying to profit from the deaths of its employees, and take advantage of the tax law which allowed it to deduct the premiums.
Going back a quarter century or so, the biggest complaints against Walmart have commonly been thus:
- Extremely aggressive about interrupting unionization attempts.
- Relatively low pay, particularly for the bottom 1/2 of employees.
- They squeeze suppliers to restrain prices to the benefit of consumers. This essentially adds another aggrieved voice in the crowd.
- Then there's a very broad, vague, low value argument about the soul of communities being destroyed by their presence. This premise was particularly common ~15 years ago. It has turned out to be almost entirely bunk, so it's an argument rarely used against them today. Today, the focus is overwhelmingly on pay, specifically that their low wages force tax payers to subsidize said wages.
Most of these arguments collapse upon rational inspection. For example, they universally pay better than mom & pop local stores and employ far more people in small & mid size towns / communities. Then the argument gets flipped: it then gets said that they intentionally pay higher than local competitors, and advocate in favor of higher minimum wage laws, to crush local competition (ie damned if they do, damned if they don't).
The same people that dislike Walmart, you'll find, will frequently lodge 'for the common good' arguments economically. Walmart acts for the good of the many, as they squeeze supplier margins to hold prices down. Somehow saving 200 million people money is turned against them as a negative.
Their low pay is an interesting issue unto itself. Their margins are hyper low, at 2.5% net income margins; their sales have been flat and profits have been falling for years. If they pay each employee just another $4,000 to $5,000 per year, they'd go bankrupt (particularly as they begin the long hard war with Amazon). They're often contrasted with Costco, which pays meaningfully higher wages; however Costco manages that by employing far fewer people per dollar of sales. To match Costco on that, Walmart would have to fire at least half a million people, most of whom have few skills to do any other higher paying jobs.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the low pay / tax payer subsidy issue, is who the tax payers are that are doing the subsidizing: mostly the rich. The top 1/3 in America pay almost all the income taxes that go toward subsidizing Walmart's bottom 1/2 of employees who earn low wages. This almost never gets discussed when the topic comes up, in fact it's aggressively dodged. The people doing the arguing, are overwhelmingly in favor of the rich subsidizing the poor, but for some reason it's not ok when it comes to this (ie they're actually arguing it's bad that the rich tax payers subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, it's comical). This is just a baseless attack on Walmart, because of what they are. The only alternative to having the top 1/3 subsidize Walmart's poorest employees, is to have those employees lose their jobs and then the subsidy goes to 100% instead of being partial as it is today.
> 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.
What I'm hopeful of is that (barring evil patents or monopolies) all of those things should be able to be outsourced a third party vendor or service. Hopefully in the future you will be able to simply contract out alternative delivery service, or drone delivery, or "prime"-like membership programs with the click of a button or an API call.
That is what's happening today, offered by the only company with the scale to do it: Amazon (It's called FBA). Then when they see your products are selling particularly well, they stock them, undercut you, and put you out of business.
But either Amazon will have the product or it will still be valuable to another middle man.
Amazon have a lot but are a long way off having everything. Health and Beauty for example, they may have the top 50k sales ranks pretty well covered but at least the top 100k are probably worth a middle mans time.
Not all products are really valuable to a middle man. From my insights regarding Amazon sellers, ~70% of the profit is made from ~5% of the products, and those are the products Amazon is taking away from them. If they then only have the low-profit items remaining, they aren't able to be profitably on Amazon anymore, unless they operate at significant scale - a scale that becomes very hard to grow to when Amazon is constantly taking away your means to do so.
But you have to realize that Amazon was able to become so advanced in all those areas because they had an (arguably) unfair 20-year advantage thanks to this patent.
If we could rerun the timeline without this patent, then the e-commerce field would likely not be so lopsided.
Absolutely. They have the capital and the scale to outcompete you and anyone that tries to go against them. Bar regulations to protect competition, you have no chance.
I've heard this, but I honestly don't see it in practice.
If you've been to a Costco recently you may be surprised to find that they're much less expensive than Amazon. They have more buying power and stronger vendor relationships that AMZN simply doesn't have. Prime Day 2017 was also a huge disappointment (Mostly overpriced junk like bluetooth speakers).
Honestly I think the only thing that works in Amazon's favor is the convenience, and their private distribution/delivery network. Beyond that they're nothing more than a generic online marketplace.
Not necessarily. It could easily lead to inferior products as every point on the pipeline from manufacturers to distributors cut costs. It can, in addition, lead to a monopoly situation providing for relatively unconstrained pricing.
The space (from my online shopping experience) seems to be divided between Amazon (with one click checkout, fast delivery etc) and everyone else (42 click checkout and one week delivery, if you're lucky).
If the one-click patent was a major inhibitor of competition, I'd basically expect to see a lot of two-click check out options. Instead I find myself creating a million redundant user accounts, telling people that my mothers maidenname is "khhsyebg" (she's got some Dothraki blood, it seems) and parsing "don't not uncheck the box if you wish to prevent us from causing the absence of non-delivery of our newsletter and also not abstaining from passing on your details to third parties".
> and everyone else (42 click checkout and one week delivery, if you're lucky)
Certianly in the UK the friction of buying from "non-Amazon" websites exists ( create an account, enter payment etc ) but Amazon just uses the same delivery networks as everyone else.
In fact a small company often dispatches faster in my experience than Amazon; for non-Prime at least they've
been stretching the 'Dispatching Soon' timelines to nearly a week[0]. Of course once it's in that status you can't cancel the order.
[0] As a third-party seller through Amazon I am required to dispatch within two working days. One rule for them and another for the little folk.
That's surprising to me as a US customer. Unless I'm notified at checkout that something is out of stock, I fully expect Prime deliveries to arrive within two days of ordering. In fact, I've seen items that took an extra day to process get shipped overnight to make up the day.
The US Amazon checkout shows an estimated delivery date for Prime items that includes processing time and is >95% reliable in my experience.
Amazon prime is consistently next day in the UK (and I'll happily pay a non-trivial premium to order something on Prime) - even sometimes same day, although that's never promised, just an occasional nice surprise. GP is talking about "marketplace" which has wildly varying delivery time (a lot of the products are drop-shipped from China), but generally do arrive within the promised window.
The parent was talking about non-Prime, though, and they didn't claim the estimates weren't accurate.
My non-Prime sold-by-Amazon in-stock orders from Amazon US consistently take 3-6 business days to process but they still arrive by the estimated date (so it is fine by me). If I pay for faster shipping they ship on the day I order.
The issues I've had (in the UK, indeed) has not been with the delivery time itself (which is often stated, correctly, as "next day" or "2-3 days") but with the time to process my order, some times taking several days. Most severely, two months, as they had neglected to account for the time it takes to customs process a container from China. But the items did arrive one week (plus two months) after the order was placed.
But yes, a lot of small vendors do ship very quickly. They do still generally require me to create an account and unsubscribe from their newsletter, regardless of unticking the box during signup.
>but Amazon just uses the same delivery networks as everyone else.
Definitely not true in the US. They've coerced USPS to deliver on Sundays and have their own courier service. Internally their ability to get items to the couriers is much faster than almost every single business out there.
> "don't not uncheck the box if you wish to prevent us from causing the absence of non-delivery of our newsletter and also not abstaining from passing on your details to third parties"
Most companies don't even have that checkbox anymore, the amount of accounts I've had to make that lead to more emails demanding my attention is shocking
At least here in .de, there's plenty of other online retailers which are just as fast, or at least almost, and while the checkout sometimes has a step or two more than amazon, it's rarely that bad.
> The space (from my online shopping experience) seems to be divided between Amazon (with one click checkout, fast delivery etc) and everyone else (42 click checkout and one week delivery, if you're lucky).
I have actually never seen the famous one click checkout despite being a frequent Amazon customer. Could it perhaps be illegal in Europe? Not sure what else would explain this.
Unless you don't pay for Prime, then you get the same week-long shipping and have to be careful not to click any of the boxes along the way that will make you a Prime member.
The 1-Click patent was the genesis of a long debate between Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly about software patents. It resulted in the formation of BountyQuest, a 2000-era effort to pay bounties for prior art for bad patents. Unfortunately it didn't really work out. But the history of arguing about software patents is pretty interesting. http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly//news/patent_archiv...
I've used it a few times but only because I know amazon's costs and shipping policies are consistent, and they give you enough information up front on the item page to make a fully informed purchase decision.
Other ecommerce sites frequently have so many additional/hidden charges that I would never want to click "buy" right from the item page. I abandon so many carts when I get to the checkout page because there's $20 in shipping charges on a $8 item, or they've tacked on a $5 handling fee, or they wait until the very end of the process to tell you that the item will ship in 8 weeks.
Maybe it is different in the US, but in the UK the charges being inconsistent is the reason I do not use One Click. (Amazon UK not being as good seems to be a theme in these comments.)
I don't think that's the case for Amazon Prime (UK customer)
In my experience the price shown and delivery time estimate is always accurate, and as a Prime customer the delivery fee is included in your subscription
I'm in virtually the same boat as you. I've been a prime customer for over a decade even and have easily spent over $500k with them (lots of business purchases) throughout the years, yet I've used 1-click purchase a single digit number of times.
I'm using it because I know I have time to cancel it if it's a mistake, and worst case scenario it's very easy to send them back stuff. Just print the return slip.
I used it once. About an hour later after nearly having a heart attack when I saw the email that I had purchased a $5,000 generator. I quickly canceled it, but it would have been such a pain to try to ship that back or even take delivery of it. I disabled it and still do.
Just because it is easy to return things doesn't make me feel good about doing it - it is such a waste. Maybe I should look at it as creating jobs.
hmm works for me all the time... but i'm curious i wonder are you running a standard browser, locally without proxy, from within the US? Not that i'm advocating you must, but curious if you hit on any of these?
This patent prevented a nefarious checkout pattern across myriad potentially unscrupulous store fronts for more than a decade so was it really so bad? ;)
Some days I feel Amazon was not only the world's largest non-profit organization but also among its most beneficent!
That's actually a really depressing thought. Now we'll all have to start being even more vigilant to make sure that the "checkout" buttons are "start the multi-step checkout process" buttons, and not "gimme this item with whatever payment information is on file" buttons.
On the plus side, most sites I'd be really worried about probably don't have my checkout information anyway.
Really? Are there really so many sites that you don't trust, yet have they have your credit card info? I can't think of a single site that fits that bill for me. If one did nefariously charge me for something an make it a hassle to cancel, a chargeback would be an easy solution; it's not likely I want to maintain a business relationship with them anyway.
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.
In my mind patents were made to protect inventors and the little guy so that he/she could capitalize on their invention before the market is unleashed. When multi-billion dollar companies are gaining government sanctioned exclusivity to something through a patent, something seems off.
But in this example they weren't a multi-billion dollar company 20 years ago.
> In my mind patents were made to protect inventors and the little guy so that he/she could capitalize on their invention before the market is unleashed. When multi-billion dollar companies are gaining government sanctioned exclusivity to something through a patent, something seems off.
I agree. Patent laws have created for moral reasons instead of practical ones. Let this be a lesson to lawmakers to pass regulation based on facts instead of feelings.
> When multi-billion dollar companies are gaining government sanctioned exclusivity to something through a patent, something seems off.
So, in your world, why would a medical research lab spend billions researching and developing new drugs, spend years going through regulatory approval and testing, only to have their drug be sold for pennies as a generic?
This comes up as an example a lot. The solution is not to eliminate patents, but just to get rid of a one-size-fits-all patent. Medical patents shouldn't be on the same footing as a software patent. For example, you could maybe ask for a FDA-Approved-Drug-Patent which would be different than new-roller-skates patent.
Not to sound condescending but the following phrase
"years of research and brilliant ideas should be protected"
can never adequately define what must be patented and what must not be. An brilliant idea need not take years of research. Even the interpretation of the word brilliant is debatable.
PS: I'm not taking any stance with respect to patents. Just saying that it's not black and white.
Agreed, no issue I know of is black and white.
I think the grammar is correct though, or should I have said "years of research OR brilliant ideas"? Would you have preferred "insightful ideas"
Patents are required to be both "novel" (no one has done it before) and "non-obvious" (a typical software engineer wouldn't have thought of it). These seem to cover it pretty well to me, except that novelty is trivial to find in the software world and the bar for obviousness seems to be completely ignored; I've never heard of a software patent so obvious it was rejected.
Agreed. Many things sound obvious in plain English but when you ask someone to write an actual law that everyone will abide by (and will survive committees and constitutionality challenges), it becomes quite a bit more difficult.
I agree about how broken it is. But for a patent attorney, it is gold, if you can extend the idea. If I had more money to defend one back in 2000 I would own mesh networks...
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.
>I guess for totally impulse purchases it helps eliminate a step for the buyer to reconsider a purchase.
AFAIK (I only ever used one-click checkout on amazon.co.jp) there's a 15-minute or so window where you can review and modify/cancel your order, so the step is still there (though most people would probably ignore it). I found it convenient to use because domestic shipping was free, and I'm already seeing the price of the product, which is the only thing I'm buying, so there's nothing else to review.
You can review everything on the receipt screen and easily undo if you don't like it. This is the same UX as discarding a draft in Gmail - it's done, but you can undo.
I read somewhere that when Bezos told his team to build one click, they came back to him with a 4-click flow. So he told them no, I want one click, and they came back with two clicks (gotta have a confirmation in case that first click was accidental, right?)
So maybe it really was a nontrivial invention for its time.
The nontrivial bit is it starts a timer which allows users to cancel after a click. This works because delivery is far from instant and is fairly insightful, IMO.
I wish I had thought of patenting a half click patent. If a click is a mouse button down and up, how about something 50% more efficient - order immediately on mouse button down? Surely that is non-obvious!
So NZ banned software patents. Does that mean a NZ company that hosted everything outside the US would have been exempt (even if they had a drop shipping market in the US?)
A "merely descriptive" mark can't infringe another trademark, so "1-click" as a trademark is nearly impossible to enforce.
You could enforce it with additional restrictions, like color / size / font / layout, but the text "1-click" can freely be used to describe processes that require 1 click.
"E-commerce will change forever" ... strong words. Amazon has features that are a much bigger value proposition than one-click purchases. I don't see this changing the landscape in any significant way.
"They have proposed ways of storing cards and address data in the browser..."
Oh hell no! Just what we need, yet another reason for people to attack your browser. Don't we already suggest to never use the "remember your password" button? Now, it's "remember your credit card." No. Please, just no.
Chrome already has an option to remember your credit card. I love it. It means I can be in line for a show, see that the venue has another one coming up, pull up the purchase page on my phone, and have tickets in second. Or my partner can buy tickets to the theater on the way to the theater, seamlessly. Etc. TLDR It's super convenient, and if my credit card details get stolen or whatever, that's Chase's problem, not mine.
> Don't we already suggest to never use the "remember your password" button?
The "remember your password" functionality is awful if your threat model is "I don't want my passwords to be stolen", but it's terrific if your threat model includes "I don't want to be phished".
When the news about Soundcloud's future emerged, discussions turned through some thoughts about how to help SC keep its roots and grow into what it can be rather than be a Spotify competitor. The Amazon One-Click patent was brought up about how to allow buying the song / supporting the artist/record label you're enjoying.
Perhaps there is a chance now for SC (and others) to use this? (It'd be interesting to see how often the patent thwarted any business decisions. Also, I wonder if this was considering in the funding round...)
Simply from a legal standpoint this is BS. In some countries you have to display the customer a whole bunch of information and terms before he can make the purchase.
Just because Amazon ignores this due to their size and $$$ doesn't mean everyone can.
I have never used one-click but I have relatives that compusively purchase off Amazon with one-click all of the time. It is almost a drug to them because they click a button and then stuff shows up at their door. For some users, removing all barriers except for a click is sufficient to get them to buy.
As a former core developer of OSCommerce, where our users were threatened with patent infringement over exactly this, I will order a nice glas of whiskey, celebrating this thing is finally over. This one patent made me join the fight against software patents in Europe, which we sort of won in 2005.
anecdote: I use Amazon for practically all of my shopping, only supplementing it by going to a brick-and-mortar for food.
I have never used the "buy now" feature, so honestly I think it's impact is a bit overblown.
Here are my reasons I never use it:
1) I do a lot of comparison shopping, so I like to review my orders before the final purchase. (in case I put something in my cart and then later added something better)
2) I want to make sure I don't order something under $35 and get stuck paying for expedited shipping (which is free for prime members over $35 in purchases)
3) I have a few addresses and cards on file, and want to make sure the order will use the right one.
4) I use the cart as a temporary list, anything that looks interesting during my shopping session gets thrown in there (or perhaps another browser window if doing comparisons).
Yes. I live an hour from big box stores so I know my UPS driver by name.
5) I use my cart as a queue of things to buy that I don't need "right now". I'll let things pile up in there until I do need something. I think it is a waste of fuel, boxes, etc. to place an order every day of the week instead of one box a week.
This is a "feature" I actively avoid. Why in the world would anyone want to buy something online without a chance to review their purchase? Other web pages don't even let you leave the page without asking "are you sure?".
it's been a while since i've bought from amazon, but i recall that one-click orders have a delay before being 'executed'. this lets you use one-click multiple times and have items bundled to save shipping, as well as review and cancel.
These days the retailers don't (or shouldn't) store it. They store a token that the payment processor (e.g. Stripe) uses as a key to the card data that they store.
If you as a retailer have your checkout page set up properly, the actual card data never hits your server.
You mean like a temporary credit card number valid for a small period of time or valid for a specific vendor?
We have those (at least in America), and have for many years. Services like "ShopSafe".
They also create many hassles and headaches. Can make returns difficult, validation difficult (please show the card used, what, it's a virtual card?), and the rigor may not be great (reoccurring charges on "invalidated" numbers, etc).
online virtual credit card #'s with specific values have pro's and con's for sure. we processes $millions of these for e-commerce: https://www.abine.com/maskme/features/cards/
#disclaimer i work at abine.
I know virtual credit card numbers are a thing, but on the other hand I just solve it by having a different CC for subscription payments vs everyday transactions. If the every day card has fraud and I need to change the number, no skin off my back. If the subscription card needs to be changed, I have a convenient list of everyone I need to contact because it sees the exact same charges every month.
For debit cards, the dispute process is called Reg E and the consumer is out the money for a month or more until decided in their favor. So there's risk in storing a debit card number.
"if there's any fraud the merchant eats all of it!"
- not 100% true- see "fraud Liability Shift topics" Your card Issuer gets it if it's an EMV (ie chip was dipped) card-present transaction, merchant gets the liability if it was online or over the phone-Exception being if 3DS is used. Fraud is ultimately payed for either by your bank or by the merchant.
This is an astoundingly naive view of what credit card fraud costs. The merchants are not doing this charitably. Your cost will be amortized somewhere.
Of course the products are all marked up to cover the fraud, but it's not like you can opt out of that markup so you might as well take advantage of the convenience.
edit: for clarification, yes for in store, my card is the same card and I cant easily generate a new number to swipe at a POS, but online & via app I manage 1-time payments (generated card number shuts off after successful charge) or 'Merchant Locked' card numbers that will only work at that merchant and which I can shut off any time.
With this i'm much more comfortable giving out my CC to a shady/basic website if i'm concerned. (ie buying mulch from the company's barebones website)
"These are the ones [credit card processors] we have worked with in the past that we know use a card vault. Others likely support it too"
Note The more common term is credit card Tokenization, not just Vaulting, and is not required for 1-click if the merchant is retaining CC numbers. - although this is not recommended due to PCI and breach liability.
This is almost like a patent on cars that go above 60 MPH. Or a website that takes less than 50 ms to load.
They have a patent on the RESULT of technology. The patent SHOULD be on THEIR VERY SPECIFIC IMPLEMENTATION of 1-click checkout, but instead it is on all implementations that result in 1-click checkout.
Would anyone like something built to take advantage of this? I'm open next week between contracts (full-stack JS), maybe there is a browser extension or CMS plugin that would make this feature easy to implement?
I'm sure Amazon has already filed an application for "Zero-click checkout". Something like "swipe over a product image in a 'V' pattern to checkout", etc.
Interesting to find out such a patent even exists. Does this mean the sites on which I have seen the one-click feature implemented were until now breaking the patent?
'No one knows' here is idiomatic. Your response seems fallacious; you are equivocating by representing the words as literal, rather than addressing the idiomatic meaning.
> 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