Before the Future, Fix the Present: Why Retailers Need to Focus on Conversion First

Emerging technologies like AI and virtual reality hold tremendous promise for the future of retail. The potential to revolutionize shopping experiences and reshape retail captivates our imagination. But trailblazing innovation, while important, should co-exist with fixing existing inefficiencies begging for solutions now.

Consider the conversion problem in ecommerce. Even today, 76% of shoppers who add an item to their cart fail to finish their purchase. While AI based personalization and product recommendations can improve businesses long-term, simple things like removing unnecessary steps and providing customers with fast, secure, and simple buying processes will have an immediate impact on businesses top lines. In fact, that’s the minimum customers are expecting today.

Put more directly: If a shopper abandons their cart after adding items to it, any whiz-bang tech magic crafted earlier to encourage shoppers to add more items to the cart are pointless. With economic uncertainty looming and margins under pressure, focusing on improvements delivering impact today allows retailers to build a strong foundation for cutting-edge advances tomorrow.  

Consider our recent case study with Revolve, which proved the immense value of nailing the basics of checkout. By implementing Bolt’s One-Click Checkout, Revolve saw a 3.2% increase in checkout conversion and a 4% revenue lift across mobile and web. It took just one engineer a few short weeks to deploy the change—and the global fashion powerhouse started reaping the benefits immediately.

There was nothing flashy about this shift. It was simply fixing a broken part of the checkout process, which now allows Revolve to automatically recognize returning shoppers and give them the express experience they deserve. This removed unnecessary redirects and extra steps, providing customers a friction-free buying experience in a merchant friendly way.

This case study—and other similar success stories with hundreds of merchants—reinforces the power of focusing on top-line growth before entertaining advanced innovation lacking proven ROI. As I've stressed time and again, checkout has been a pain point for 20+ years since Amazon pioneered one-click shopping in 1997—yet it remains unsolved for many retailers.

I am more excited than anyone about all the groundbreaking technologies that are immediately accessible to everyone. As a technologist at heart, nothing thrills me more than reading about the latest developments in emerging fields, and I firmly believe innovations like AI and AR have incredible potential to shape retail's future. Bolt has been leveraging AI to help our customers with fraud management for years, and now is incorporating AI to solve some of the most pressing biggest problems in retail today. But we understand the immediate needs of our customers and that everything starts with the consumer. Put simply, we don’t let the glittering promise of future technology distract us from delivering value when retailers and their shoppers need it most.

Today’s execution enables tomorrow’s innovation. The reality is retailers continue leaving revenue on the table from inadequate checkout experiences. And revenue pressure makes it imperative to capture the quick wins available right now.

In almost all domains, flash tends to win out over substance, even when we know that the routine, boring work is what makes things great. That core lesson is true in retail too: seamless checkout is readily achievable, requiring no futuristic technology. And the data shows solving it is tremendously valuable.

The future of innovation promises to astonish—but first, you must fix the present.