payments

Fast Wants to Revolutionize Online Checkouts, But the Competition’s Fierce

Fintech firms are battling for checkout dominance.
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Francis Scialabba

· 3 min read

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Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.

On a recent late-night scroll, I noticed that a retailer I won’t name here had a crowded payment options page. I shot off a vague tweet-complaint, overwhelmed by all the choices. Several replies came back with the same answer: “Fast can fix this.”

What’s Fast? A fintech platform that launched September 2 with a Ricky Bobby value prop. Fast claims to make online ordering speedier than any other service. Here’s how it works:

  • Shoppers fill out a single Fast form that encrypts their preferred shopping info.
  • Once they’re enrolled, they can check out with one click at any of Fast’s retail partners.
  • Fast then aggregates all receipts and shipping info into a post-purchase dashboard.

“None of the other payment methods solve this, whether you pay with PayPal or a normal credit card or Apple Pay [or] Google Pay,” Fast CEO Domm Holland told me. “They may make the payment process easier if you can use those products, but the post-purchase still sucks.”

Is Fast legit? Launch partner BigCommerce (with 60,000+ merchants) and investor Stripe seem to think so. Fast also ran a ballistic social media campaign for shoppers to test its service with Fast merch orders; responses varied.

Battle of the buttons

“In the U.S., there are only a handful of digital payment methods with significant traction,” Lily Varón, senior analyst at Forrester Research, told Retail Brew. And they’re growing, she added: “Digital payments have seen an adoption boost since the pandemic hit, as consumers are shopping more online or using contactless payments in stores to avoid touching terminals.”

Fast’s founders say it “sells itself” because its click-and-it’s-yours tech could reduce friction and result in fewer abandoned carts for retailers. But the existing payment offerings—think big tech firms with “Pay” tacked on the end—already do this with two-click services and other perks.

  • Shopify claims Shop Pay can increase conversions by 50% or more.
  • Varón said PayPal currently has the most market share across payment providers.

Brands on buttons: Taylor Sicard, cofounder of Win Brands Group, told me that offering two to four payment methods is “the best option.” Not every consumer uses every payment platform, and some are limited to certain browsers. So retailers have to walk a fine line between meeting customers’ needs and overwhelming them with options.

For Fast to break through, it’ll need to build affinity with shoppers first. “The real test will be if Fast can [...] turn their logo into an actionable step similar to the PayPal logo, so consumers intuitively know what Fast is when they see it,” Sicard said.

Looking ahead...“Our goal is to process every payment on the internet from the consumer perspective,” Allison Barr Allen, cofounder and COO at Fast, told me.

That’s an ambition best described as aspirational, but there’s interest: Holland said that Fast received as many inquiries from sellers on its launch day as it had in the entire previous month.

Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know

Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.