Bold Commerce, provider of a headless, composable commerce checkout solution, has a new offering that lets brands and retailers enable checkout directly from a video or email without the intermediate step of visiting a product page, where cart abandonment can happen.
The so-called accelerator, built by Bold Commerce’s agency partner Coalition Technologies, uses API calls to integrate a checkout link directly into any shopper engagement, with the aim of increasing conversion at a point where buying intent is high.
With the solution, retailers and brands can let shoppers watching a video click a pull-down menu and check out a product without leaving the video. The initial focus is on YouTube, but plans call for expanding it to other channels, both live and prerecorded. Bold Commerce has an integration partnership with PayPal, and helped it develop headless checkout on Adobe Commerce, but the accelerator works with other payment platforms as well.
Bold Commerce says it has cracked the code on a direct-to-checkout capability from shoppable video that has been tried by companies like Facebook, Amazon and Poshmark, having spent five years developing its composable, headless capabilities. Earlier this year, Instagram exited live shoppable video, months after parent Facebook did the same.
Peter Karpas, CEO of Bold Commerce, said the flexible nature of its MACH architecture (microservices-based, API first, cloud native, headless) is what enabled creation of the new accelerator. Bold, whose clients include Vera Bradley, Staples and Harry Rosen, is a member of the MACH Alliance.
“The beautiful thing about headless checkout is you can put it anywhere, on a video page or directly on a product page, in an email, you can move it anywhere you want, all through APIs,” he said. “There’s nothing mystical about it, you can call the APIs from anywhere.”
While retailers and brands see product page visits as a way to lure shoppers into adding “you may also like” items to a cart before checkout, the extra step can also lead to abandonment. To address this, Karpas said Bold Commerce’s accelerator lets them use widgets to add cross-sell and upsell items at checkout, offer a subscription option or payment plans like buy now pay later (BNPL). The checkout can also be preconfigured to add any item viewed to the cart when the shopper lands there.
Solutions from Firework and AiBuy enable direct checkout from video, but Karpas said Bold Commerce’s differentiator is the ability to personalize the checkout experience for each shopper, including integration of upsell, cross-sell, BNPL and buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS).
“They can also optimize checkout based on a shopper’s profile, what kind of device they’re on and their preferred shipping and payment options,” he said. “Brands can easily do all of this without having to layer multiple applications or create custom code.”