Full Checkout Beats Standalone Buttons
Jordan Gal, CEO of Rally, on building the Switzerland of checkout
A checkout button business is structurally weak because it sits off to the side of the merchant’s real checkout and only wins the sliver of buyers who choose that button. Fast was added next to PayPal, Apple Pay, and other options, so each merchant gave it only a narrow slice of payment volume. Rally’s bet is that owning the full checkout page captures every guest order that passes through it, lets it save shopper identity data, and makes each merchant relationship economically meaningful.
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Fast’s model looked more like adding one more logo to a crowded checkout. End to end checkout platforms like Rally and Bolt instead replace the merchant’s actual checkout flow, so they touch the shipping form, payment selection, confirmation page, and repeat purchase path, which gives them far more payment volume per merchant.
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The network effect also works differently. A button has to persuade shoppers to pick it, then persuade merchants to keep showing it. A full checkout can save a shopper after any normal guest purchase, then recognize them later across merchants, which is how Shop Pay built a stronger acquisition loop.
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The numbers make the problem concrete. Fast was described as burning about $10M a month in 2021 while generating roughly $50K in revenue. Bolt generated about $30M in 2021, showing that even better funded checkout networks still needed far more merchant volume and shopper density to justify venture scale.
Checkout is heading toward fewer standalone payment buttons and more merchants adopting a default checkout layer that can route many payment methods underneath it. The winners will be the companies that control the main flow of commerce, capture shopper identity on every order, and then turn that position into higher conversion, lower payment costs, and new revenue from upsells and repeat purchases.