.jpg){kind=avatar}
San Francisco based provider of a streamlined online checkout platform for small businesses raised $68m in Series B funding co-led by Activant Capital and Tribe Capital.
According to Ryan Breslow, Bolt’s CEO and co-founder, Amazon has “spent hundreds of millions of dollars perfecting the flow” of the site’s buying experience. That faster checkout "flow" can encourage shoppers to spend more. In a 2017 study, for instance, the digital infrastructure firm Akamai found that websites that were just 1/10th of a second slower than competitors’ saw the conversion rate—the rate at which site visitors actually made a purchase—drop by 7%. Online retail is particularly brutal at the point of checkout, with as many as 80% of shoppers simply abandoning their carts before paying. But it’s nearly impossible for smaller sites to achieve Amazon’s degree of refinement, and Bolt says it wants to change that equation by making speedy checkout accessible for smaller online sellers. Breslow says Bolt, which combines a checkout interface with fraud detection and payment services, has cut average checkout times on its customers' sites nearly in half, from around a minute to just over 30 seconds.
unknownx500
