Why Bolt is going to Win

To understand Bolt, let’s first go back to Amazon.com and the history of commerce. Amazon realized that by centralizing commerce on one site they could offer the best prices, build the best tech, and provide a 10X better consumer experience. Amazon enabled billions to shop online reliably and conveniently. 

But once Amazon reached that scale, any independent brand had a huge disadvantage compared to the Amazon monolith. They had to build tech from scratch, had no data, and had a poor consumer experience. And so came Commerce 1.0: the Monolith, which had price economies of scale, tech economies of scale, a data moat, and a great consumer experience. And all of that lived on one domain: Amazon.com. 

Soon after, shopping carts sprung up to enable commerce for independent brands. One took off the most: Shopify. Why did they take off ahead of all the others? They were the most centralized approach to independent commerce. The commerce enablement ecosystem was nascent and struggling. Shopify’s centralized approach allowed them to centralize tech, data, and the consumer experience. This allowed them to get ahead of anyone else in terms of functionality. 

And thus was born Commerce 2.0: the Monolith Tech Platform, which had tech economies of scale, a data moat, and a great consumer experience. All on one fully enclosed platform: Shopify. 

But this gave rise to another problem: over-centralization. The incentives became misaligned with the two parties most important to them because merchants felt locked-in and trapped and developers and tech partners would get eaten.

That brings us to commerce today, when there is a renaissance of commerce enablers. During the pandemic, investors realized that commerce is a massive opportunity. Commerce enablers started to attract huge amounts of funding. There are now world-class companies tackling almost every layer of the commerce stack.

These enablers can do things far better than the Monoliths because it's all they live and breathe. The non-Shopify carts are also making great strides, and all the tools are catching up. However, without Bolt, there remain two show-stopper problems:

1. No one-click network of shoppers
2. No easy way to integrate new tools into checkout

 These 10X problems hold consumers back from shopping and keep merchants from innovating. The shopping carts are doing too much to also solve these problems, which are tough on their own. (We wrote a manifesto on this two years ago, discussing how Bolt’s checkout is the “missing platform” in commerce.)

And all of that brings us to today, when something beautiful is happening:

1. Shopping carts provide the core commerce functionality.
2. Bolt provides the headless checkout and one-click network.
3. Commerce enablers provide everything else. 

This is Commerce 3.0, which consists of tech economies of scale, a data moat, and great consumer experience. All via an ecosystem. 

Here’s the key differentiating principle: An open ecosystem that brings everyone together is far more powerful than any centralized monolith. As Maju Kuruvilla, Bolt’s CEO, said, “I spent nearly a decade centralizing commerce. But now it’s clear that the next step is decentralization.” 

Even Amazon is realizing that the end of shopping on Amazon.com might be near. Recently they decided to democratize access to Prime Fulfillment for off-site, independent merchants. This is great news for Bolt and the Commerce 3.0 ecosystem—and bad news for Shopify and the Commerce 2.0 monolith. In Commerce 3.0, anyone who brings something beneficial to independent merchants is helpful. That is the power of an ecosystem. 

So, given all that context, why is Bolt going to win? Because the world is now ready for Commerce 3.0, and Commerce 3.0 needs Bolt. Bolt is truly one of a kind, and we are hard to “Fast Follow.” Indeed, incumbents will struggle to replicate Bolt’s product. Here’s why: 

1. We have a massive technical moat — The reason we’re so confident about Bolt is we know how hard it is to replicate. We spent nearly 8 years locked in a room just building integrations. These integrations would make us pull our hair out. Bolt is a Middleware company coupled with a Consumer & B2B SaaS company. Middleware companies are hard and nasty to build. But they are really hard to replicate once they’ve achieved scale. 
2. We have a huge head start on the shopper network – Even if someone were to build the tech (of which we’re 8 yrs ahead), they’d be starting from scratch in building a shopper network. Bolt’s network is nearly 14 million shoppers and growing by the day.
3. We have deep partnerships with the shopping carts – Bolt has deep partnerships with most of the major non-monolith shopping carts: BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, PrestaShop, Salesforce, WooCommerce, Volusion, Solidus. Some are going so far as to default Bolt on for new merchants. 

But that’s not all. We’re also building the future. We are not stopping with just headless checkout and a one-click network. We’re pushing the envelope on what’s possible with decentralized commerce, including:

1. Putting Checkout Everywhere – This enables a one-click checkout experience from ads, media sites, publishers, chatbots, and social posts. The future of commerce is Everywhere, meaning it will take place at the point of inspiration.
2. Going All-In on Crypto – Our original vision of one-click crypto is around the corner. We recently acquired Wyre in the largest acquisition of crypto to-date. NFT purchasing, custodial wallets, fiat on-ramps, and more. All coming soon.
3. All Kinds of Fancy Features – We’ve built an entire Payments Orchestration Layer, and we’ve redefined ecommerce authentication.  Recently, we just launched a Shopper Assistant widget, and there’s much more to come.

To sum it all up, Bolt is growing at lightning speed. Ultimately, the main reason we’re going to win and what’s gotten us this far to begin with: We execute. Our team is relentless and knows how to ship products and sell them. The data speaks for itself:  

• 13.8M total Bolt shopper accounts (131% YoY increase)
• 836 total Bolt active merchant accounts across all product lines (192% YoY increase)
• 29% of transactions are one-click from the network (31% YoY increase) 

(You can read more from Bolt’s CEO about these numbers and our recent wins here, and you can try Bolt yourself here.)

Finally—and crucially—we have a once-in-a-lifetime team, building together, and bridging execution with humanity. We’ve inspired 180 other companies to build consciously, too. (If you’d like to see what Conscious Culture is all about, visit conscious.org.)

Bolt’s mission is simple: Level the playing field and democratize the commerce experience. Create instant and seamless commerce products so that the smallest mom and pop brands have the same advantages as Amazon.com. Nobody – and especially not the NYTimes – is going to get in the way of that.