The story below caught my eye due to a project I’m working on, this month, to shorten and simplify the checkout process over at GazLanNaThai.com

GazLanNaThai.com uses the highly popular osCommerce Online Merchant website software, and unfortunately the checkout flow runs to 6+ pages, therefore I want to condense that to around two or three to reduce cart abandonment during checkout.

The osCommerce add-ins library and community discussion boards revealed the existence of two options for creating a one-page checkout, and several good discussions regarding less drastic checkout flow reductions.  But first, the Amazon announcement -

Currently, merchants selling more than one item at a time integrate with Checkout by Amazon using either the XML API or the HTML API.

With the introduction of the Checkout by Amazon Shopping Cart, integration with Checkout by Amazon is much easier. With this Shopping Cart, your customers can easily add, view, and edit items, and then complete their purchases using the information in their Amazon.com account.

Easy Integration: You can be up and running in minutes with the Checkout by Amazon Shopping Cart just by inserting few lines of HTML code.

1-Click® Ordering: The Checkout by Amazon Shopping Cart can identify Amazon.com customers shopping on your website and offer them Amazon’s 1-Click experience. Your customers never leave your website during their entire shopping and payment experience.

Match Your Website’s Appearance: The Checkout by Amazon Shopping Cart can be easily customized to match your website style by changing the background and text colors.

Learn more

Original story :Amazon Payments Blog

OK, so far so good, but pause a moment and look again at that announcement and notice the 1-Click® Ordering title.  Did you spot the ® immediately alongside the name 1-Click?

What’s got the osCommerce developer community all abuzz is that Amazon have taken the commonly used phrase and registered it as a trademark.  This means software authors and publishers worldwide are going to have to scour their offerings and make sure they are not using it in the form of “number hyphen capitalised word”.

It gets worse.  Apparently Amazon have also filed a patent for the process of one click payment interfaces and have already issued cease and destroy warnings to other developers of similar technology, including open source software programmers who are developing or supporting the free programming code voluntarily.  A few have reported receiving such court orders, on the osCommerce forums.

I’m no patent and trademark expert, but my tuppence worth says that such registrations are not good for the user or the consumer as they stifle innovation and competition.

The upshot is that it leaves me without a solution permissible for a one-page checkout (Google Checkout restrictions are also causing issues with this – boy, are their rules destructive to freedom of choice or what?  They make PayPal look like Santa Claus.)

Thus I’m working on a two to three page solution, which is not my ideal, but will have to do until I can investigate deeper and discover where the boundaries of patent infraction lie.

What do you all reckon?

Gaz

More Information : BuildaSkill’s Amazon Payments discussion forums