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Ryan Breslow

Bolt - Amazon-like payments stack for everyone else

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Bolt is — believe it or not — the world’s first end-to-end product for accepting payments online. By integrating the entire stack, we allow any merchant to provide dead-simple checkout to their customers with dramatically less cost and effort.

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Ryan Breslow
Maker
Hi world, we’ve been working on Bolt for quite some time — almost 3 years in stealth! The goal was to not create another tool for checkout/payments/fraud, but the ultimate product to power online shopping. Would love any thoughts or feedback. What do you think can make online payments better?
Taylor Hook
@ryanbreslow This is impressive. The obvious answer is less friction, higher conversions without sacrificing security.
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@hook_taylor thank you!!
PA
@ryanbreslow Do you plan to add support for cryptocurrencies? A large but important feature to tackle!
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@prestonattebery big plans here. Not in near future, but definitely coming.
PA
@ryanbreslow Good to hear. Aside, how many of the Bolt features will be built out without having to use code? Ideally, I'd love to build a @weblfow site and use Bolt to capture payments.
orliesaurus
I would like to understand why this is different from Stripe Checkout
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@orliesaurus that's more of a lightweight way of collecting a credit card vs. this which is a robust enterprise-ready platform. Tax/shipping/discounts/platform-integrations. Plus the Bolt unique benefit of zero fraud guaranteed. Stripe is made more for developers. While also built to be super developer friendly, this is built for retailers / ecomm companies first and foremost.
orliesaurus
@ryanbreslow Great answer, can you speak more of your "zero fraud guarantee" ? - Is this something you built using machine learning etc, in house or are you leveraging an outside service to guarantee this promise of fraud? - Is the fraud system "elastic"? Can I choose the amount of protection I want or is it the same for everyone? - Do you offer any testing/demo-integration? - Does it integrate with Apple Pay / Google Pay, or do you have plans? (Asking because you mention made for mobile) I'm very interested in checkouts/payments hence the multiple questions. Appreciate any answer!
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@orliesaurus our fraud detection is, at least based off our benchmarked case studies thus far, second to none. We use machine learning heavily, ingesting hundreds of different features (variables), detecting patterns, and pinpointing good vs bad customers. It is 100% in-house and our own technology that we've been building in stealth for the last 3 years. You cannot choose the amount of protection you want: we are by default very aggressive on approving orders. We also have multiple layers to ensure this: 1. Our algorithmic layer, which is designed to lean heavily on accepting good customers (vs. blocking fraud) 2. Anything that looks like we're about to block, we don't block algorithmically. We have an in-house review team that scours the txn for additional data so as to find more reasons why to approve the order. 3. You have a "force approve" button / API to override any rejection we make. You take the liability here. Everyone approves more orders with Bolt. Also - Yes, we have a sandbox for testing - Apple Pay / Google Pay is coming very soon Thanks for all the questions and don't hesitate if you have any more!
orliesaurus
@ryanbreslow cheers mate - good answers!
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@orliesaurus sorry for the crazy delay :-) - It's not elastic, it's all 100% coverage and you're partnering with us to approve as much as we possible can. - Yes we do, we provide a trial period to try it out - Apple Pay and Google Pay coming in the next 3-6 months Here are more insights on how we do fraud detection better: https://blog.bolt.com/better-fra...
Alain Meier
The design of the lander looks great, excited to see this launch publicly!
Michael Krilivsky

Team is incredible and this will be big if they keep going into the right direction! I have not used yet, but talked to Ryan many times and excited to try it out!

Pros:

Fraud prevention, E2E, team!

Cons:

integration time?

Ram
Wow, Bolt looks very good, It's the one tool which solves all the problems for businesses and eCommerce. First of all, love the functionality and it eliminates the need to use dozens of other tools. I wish you good luck with this, i know this is a very competitive space as stripe and other payment gateways are coming up with new integrations regularly and they might catch with bolt in future. As of now, Bolt looks very promising and sets the trend, so it will definitely be a winner. :) I have few suggestions and queries here: 1.) May i know who is your target audience?? Huge companies or bolt is designed for every businesses (including small business owners) ?? 2.) It would be great to see a transparent pricing on your website. I personally feel bolt can be used by anyone, so the best bet would be to place a dynamic pricing tab on your website. e.g. from $0 to $1000 monthly transaction -- $XX will be bolt fees, and for $1000 to $10K - $XXX will be the bolt fees.. etc, you can be very creative with the pricing. if you are targeting only big companies, then it's fine to have a 'quote' tab like now. To be honest, whenever i see the quote tab, I will step back, you can check the payment gateways and other companies, they'll mostly have a clear pricing page. Dynamic pricing would work great for your business. 3.) I feel your tagline can be changed (just my personal opinion), as you compare yourself to amazon checkout, but from the video, I feel bolt is much better than the Amazon checkout (looks beautiful, quick and intuitive). 4.) Finally, It would be great to see an actual demo video of bolt in action, may be compare it side by side with other payment gateways, cite the risks, costs involved in those and how much a seller could save by using bolt every time. This will boost your brand and Bolt has a huge potential. My best wishes for you and your team, Bolt is gonna change the game for the business owners. ;)
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@ramkumarhq thank you for the compliments! Some answers for you: 1. Right now, online businesses doing 7-9 figures in annual sales volume. 2. Pricing varies depending on volume, risk, and a number of different factors given the complexity of payments (and that we're taking on full liability as opposed to others). But after a short call we provide a very simple flat rate. 3. Thank you, I agree very much :-) Appreciate the feedback. 4. Good idea, we'll absolutely work on that! Appreciate the genuine interest and feedback.
Kevin Moore
Wow, wow, wow!
Dave Deaton

Just saw the product here and really wish I had an online company to that sold merchandise online as this looks so cool and functional, I'd be totally down for getting it!

Pros:

Easy of use, cost, convenience to the customer, fraud protection, very nice design.

Cons:

None that I know of.

Sam Ayres
This seems really cool but you have to ask the question; How is any developer supposed to commit to building their project including this when your pricing isn't clearly stated? https://bolt.com/pricing .. Sadly isn't helpful at all, I have no clue how much it will cost me to use bolt in the long run.
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@sam_ayres Good question. We've been selling to larger businesses and haven't tailored things to developers yet. It's a top priority for the upcoming months. Typically (as mentioned here https://www.producthunt.com/post...) we can provide a flat rate after a simple 10 minute call. I know that's not ideal. We just have a fairly complex, risk-based business model which we're working through.
Alexandr Wang
Congrats on the launch—looks incredible & solving customer pain
Michael Ambrosino

Bolt has extremely bright individuals like Ryan and Eric who are the guys to get it done. They have also been hiring the right people onto their team to make growth sustainable.

Pros:

Great team

Cons:

It just took a long time for them to build

Shuang
Seem like it is an awesome product! Can you explain more clearly about end-to-end? And does Blot is applicable for the non-american user?
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@denniszhu Thanks so much! My answer below may help (https://cards.producthunt.com/ca...). Bolt is applicable to non-Americans. As a merchant you need to be ok with money touching a US or Canadian bank account. Otherwise, it's fully international for card acceptance, multi-currency, and 100% fraud coverage across the globe.
Will this be available world wide? Or only to restricted countries? Also, do you have your own platform to receive payments or do you have to integrate with a third party like Paypal, Stripe, 2checkout etc..?
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@montcroft Global expansion is a priority. Right now it's only available if you have a US or Canadian bank account, although we can instantly transfer from there to any intl bank. However, some intl companies for tax reasons don't want funds touching the US/Canada at all. For card acceptance, we currently support any country globally and 50+ localized currencies. We've built our own payments platform fully. No need for anyone else. Truly end-to-end.
@ryanbreslow sounds awesome! You guys are gonna be up with the big guys in no time especially if you figure out the global expansion! Best of luck! And hope to try out your service some day.
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@montcroft Thanks so much :-)
naping
Great product. Love the pricing page.
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@naping Thank you!
Agusti Fernandez Pardo
cool product @ryanbreslow, We're a online travel agency specialized in cruises, stripe asked me a looot of paperwork after 1 transaction from a client in argentina, could you work with travel/cruise niche?
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@schpn I think we can make this happen. Shoot me a direct email? rb [at] bolt .com? Thanks!
Aaron Marquez
WooCommerce integration would be fantastic. Maybe a version for businesses that do 5 - 6 figures a year via eCommerce?
Hiral Patel
@aaronm They only want 6-7 so it cost efficient to use the Fraud prevention methods, that being humans supposedly. I do not see any innovation here but a fancy checkout form.
Aaron Marquez
@hpizzy Makes sense. The checkout form is legit, but I'm thinking something like Cartloom would be better for smaller businesses. Let me know if you know of any alternatives!
Hiral Patel
@aaronm My recommendation is to use the following combination - Stripe/Braintree no revenue limitations - secondary offer Paypal and Amazon Pay - The fees are the same. Paypal and Amazon handle their own fraud prevention. Stripe and Braintree also offer builtin prevention. The trend we are seeing from last 3 years. Amazon Pay and Paypal transactions have been growing steadily as more users are using those vs standard credit card. Products with high dollar value might benefit with Bolt - watches, jewelry, electronics and most of these sites are using older processing methods so they really need to switch.
Barron Caster
Looks great, congrats on the launch!
Ryan Breslow
Maker
Phil Bagdasarian
I think this could greatly improve conversions on Packwire.com. Do you have an existing Magento 2 extension or API docs that I could have a look at?
Ryan Breslow
Maker
@phil_bagdasarian don't know how we missed this. Here's our Magento 2 integration guide: https://docs.bolt.com/docs/magen... I'll have someone from our team reach out to you asap. Thanks for the interest!
Corey Ward
As a developer, I don't have time to be an expert in every tool and platform, so I focus on the ones with the broadest coverage. Sadly, by effectively requiring an established business earning upwards of $1M/yr, it's not viable to launch an ecommerce business on Bolt, and that means it's not something I can afford to become familiar with and recommend to clients.