Eye on E-Commerce: Bold Adopts Fastlane; DNA Payments Launches Apple Pay Express

Fast on the heels of PayPal Holdings Inc.’s launch of its Fastlane service for online transactions, e-commerce platforms are eyeing the expedited-checkout technology. Some are acting. Bold Commerce early Thursday said its checkout routine has adopted Fastlane for the Adobe Commerce merchants it supports on its so-called headless-checkout platform. Headless checkout refers to instances when a third party handles checkout duties for e-commerce sellers.

PayPal launched Fastlane this summer to hasten online transactions for so-called guest checkouts, or instances where online buyers are not known to the seller. The technology won a big client in August when the processor Fiserv Inc. agreed to make it available for its e-commerce merchants.

Bold Commerce says the integration, which involves code from online-commerce developer Magento, means merchants using Adobe Commerce can set up Fastlane in under half an hour. The company says early testing with Fastlane has shown a 32% improvement in checkout speed.

Such speedy checkouts are important to online sellers, as Capterra research cited by Bold Commerce indicates two-thirds of online buyers expect checkout to take no more than four minutes. Expedited guest checkout is said to hasten and simplify the ordinary guest-checkout routine, which typically requires shoppers to create an account and enter details such as shipping addresses and payment methods. The idea behind Fastlane is to allow merchants to recognize shoppers and speed them through checkout even if the shoppers have never bought from the merchant before.

PayPal’s collaboration with Bold Commerce includes work last year to ease acceptance of PayPal’s payment methods, including Venmo, PayPal Pay Later, and credit and debit cards, as well as PayPal itself.

PayPal’s move with Bold Commerce comes as other payments players work to smooth out and hasten e-commerce checkouts. An example is the news Thursday that London-based DNA Payments Ltd. has adopted Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay Express Checkout. The move means online merchants can accept Apple Pay either at checkout or through the Express option on the Safari browser.

Consumers can use Apple Pay Express Checkout to pay from an iPhone, tablet, laptop, or desktop browser, according to Apple. More than two-thirds of mobile-payments users in the U.K. are using Apple Pay, DNA Payments says.