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Amazon just got a big win as its 1-click patent has been confirmed by the US Patent and Trademark Office after a 4 year re-examination. It’s a pretty big deal as it means that any company that wants to add convenient 1-click purchases will have to license 1-click from Amazon.

Here’s a snippet from Apple’s 1-click ordering page -

1-Click is a convenient feature that allows you to purchase anything at the Apple Store with a single click of your mouse. Simply activate 1-Click on your computer, select a product for purchase, and click the “Buy Now with 1-Click” button.

1-Click is a registered service mark of Amazon.com, Inc., used under license.

With this confirmation of the 1-Click patent by the USPTO Amazon gets to keep 1-click and license it out until 2017. W’ll be seeing a lot more pages like the Apple one above.

Amazon 1-Click – The back-story

TechFlash have an excellent article detailing the history of the 1-click patent -

The 1-Click patent, which lists Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos as one of its inventors, was filed in 1997 and refers to a “Method and system for placing a purchase order via a communications network.”

 The re-examination of Amazon’s 1-Click patent was triggered back in 2006 … At one point in the re-examination process, the U.S. Patent Office rejected many of Amazon’s claims in the patent.

… the patent office is now satisfied with amendments that Amazon made back in 2007 that base many of the patent’s claims on a “shopping cart model”.

Basically any Internet store that uses a shopping cart model must license 1-click from Amazon if they want to provide the ability to purchase items with a single click.

Companies have to make a hard decision

Companies will now be forced to choose between two undesirable choices -

1. License 1-click from Amazon and allow users the ease and convenience of single click purchasing. This is what Apple has done.
2. Change their ‘easy checkout’ to have more than one click – perhaps by adding a confirmation step. This is what B&N chose to do – check Wikipedia for the rather amusing story.

Adding an extra step, even if it is just a pop-up or confirmation page, has huge negative consequences. At every step of the purchase process users drop out (it’s a significant percentage) and now companies have to choose between paying Amazon for 1-click or adding an extra step and losing a significant amount of sales.

1-Click and eReaders

How does the 1-Click patent apply to ereaders and ebooks?

Well, the fact that Apple licenses the 1-click patent for its App Store should be a clue. Any ebook store that wants to make purchases convenient for their customers will have to license 1-Click. So will any eReader that wants to have 1-click purchases from the eReader itself.

An interesting side-effect is that ebook stores and ereaders that want to increase purchases (by making them convenient) will have to give Amazon a share of their revenue. It’s hard to beat a competitor on price when they make money every time your customers do a 1-click purchase.

We’re not overemphasizing the importance of 1-click

It might seem overkill for us to discuss 1-click and to claim it’s important even for ereaders and ebook stores. It’s not overkill - 1-click is pretty important.

One of the best ways to get interested customers to actually make a purchase is to reduce the number of steps and the amount of effort users have to put in. Here are all the benefits of 1-click -

1. It’s less effort – Users don’t have to re-enter their credit card information and shipping and billing addresses.
2. It’s less time – 5 seconds for 1-click versus 1-2 minutes going through various steps.
3. Users don’t have to spend a few minutes thinking about their purchase and reconsidering it. 
4. It’s a single click – It’s perfect for impulse purchases and smaller items (such as $10 ebooks).  
5. It’s especially helpful if the user is 100% sure they want to make the purchase.

If a competitor is doing a traditional check-out and asking for credit card information they are much, much worse off. If they do a workaround by using a confirmation step they are losing sales. There’s no authoritative work on the number of people who drop off for every extra step added - However, it must be significant since Apple is willing to pay Amazon a license fee to avoid the extra step.

How much of a difference does it make to you?

In the end it comes down to all of us and how much we care about the convenience. Adding credit card information is a bit of a pain – Especially if it’s a store we trust or if it’s a small item. An extra step to confirm a purchase might not be a bad thing – in fact, it may be great to reduce the number of impulse purchases.

What do you feel about 1-click?

It’d be interesting to do a study of how much users value the convenience of 1-click and whether some of them wish there were actually more steps so they had time to think about their purchase.

Filed under: news Tagged: | amazon strategy, path of least resistance