Today is a truly important day for ecommerce. After 20 years, Amazon’s patent on 1-click ordering finally expires. This is great news for online merchants looking to simplify shopping and increase their sales.
As a technology patent, single-click ordering gave Amazon the competitive edge with its ability to store a user’s credit card information and with only one click, allow a user to purchase any product. While this is a simple feature that most programmers can develop for online stores, Amazon’s dominance of this feature was legal, not technical in nature.
Amazon’s legal team was aggressive in ensuring the 1-click experience stayed at Amazon.com, suing Barnes & Noble in 1999 for adopting a 1-click checkout feature for the book seller’s website. This move eventually forced Barnes & Noble to add more steps into its checkout process to avoid violating Amazon’s patent.
It’s also rumored there’s only one other company that was granted a license to use it, and it was Apple. Apple used 1-click ordering for its online store in 2000 and later added the feature to iTunes.
Sources cite the value of the patent at $2.4 billion, and while the technology is not complex, many experts believe it was a powerful advantage that gave rise to Amazon’s unprecedented growth and dominance of the eCommerce space.
Time to Adopt Amazon One Click for Your Online Store
It’s easy to argue that this patent should never have been granted, but that doesn’t change today’s reality—one of Amazon’s main advantages is now available for all online stores.
If you run an eCommerce site with a large customer base, adding a 1-click ordering option can radically streamline the buying process. Besides being a big improvement to your site’s user experience, this makes it easier and faster for repeat customers to purchase from you. Bottom line: this means more sales.
Our Magento and eCommerce developers are already working to add 1-click ordering to our existing online shopping clients. Contact us today if you have questions about the best way to integrate 1-click ordering into your online store.
