A checkout button you do not own can leave your site in ten days, so build the payment step to work without it
On 5 April 2022 the one-click checkout start-up Fast told the market it was closing, and its chief executive said Fast Checkout would stop working for good on 15 April. Payments Dive reported the news the next day. Fast had raised $124 million since it was founded in 2019, and in January 2022 its chief executive had said the button was live on about 1,000 ecommerce sites. NPR, citing The Information, reported that the company had generated about $600,000 in revenue the year before. The coverage focused on the money. The detail that matters for your checkout is the calendar: merchants who had placed the button on their sites had ten days before it stopped working.
That episode is four years old. The pattern it exposed has not gone away. Every express button, wallet and branded payment method in your checkout is a product run by someone else, on their schedule. Most of the time the changes are planned and announced long in advance. Fast showed what the shopper meets when they are not.
The shopper remembers the button, not who ran it
NPR noted that Amazon’s one-click patent had expired about five years before Fast closed, which prompted companies like Fast to pursue the same feature for every other shop. A purchase in one click across many shops only works if the shopper’s details are held by the button’s provider rather than by each shop. That is what makes the click fast, and it is also what disappears when the provider does. FinTech Futures reported that the Fast checkout button would be removed from merchants’ sites and the brand retired.
From the shopper’s side, nothing about that is visible. A returning customer who paid with one tap last month comes back, finds the button gone and meets a full address and payment form instead. They do not know that a third party closed. They see a shop that suddenly asks for everything again. Some will type it all in. Some will wonder whether they are on the right site, and some will leave.
The same applies, more gently, when a button stays but changes. An express route that starts failing, a wallet that drops a card type or a logo that changes its look all reach the shopper through your page, not through the provider’s announcement.
A button only earns its space when shoppers already have an account with it
The second lesson from Fast concerns the period before the closure. According to NPR, which spoke to several former employees, the product was “spotty at best” and was not used on all products by the merchants Fast described as its biggest partners. A button that appears on some product pages and not on others teaches shoppers nothing. They cannot rely on it, so they do not look for it.
An express button also only helps shoppers who already hold an account with whoever runs it. For everyone else it is a logo above the route they will actually take, and on a phone it can push the ordinary checkout button down the screen. The test is your own order data, not the provider’s adoption figures. Measure the share of orders that go through each express route, per device, and give each route space in proportion to that share. A button used for two orders in a hundred does not belong above the route that carries the other ninety-eight.
Every option in your payment step runs on someone else’s calendar
Most changes are announced well in advance, and the Dutch market is in the middle of one. Since early 2026 shoppers have seen the combined iDEAL | Wero logo in webshops, and the parties behind the migration aim to complete the move from iDEAL to Wero by 31 December 2027. The plan published in July 2026 has iDEAL payments begin moving to Wero’s infrastructure from October 2026, so the change reaches every Dutch customer who pays with iDEAL in your checkout.
A planned change still has to be carried through your own site. The method’s name appears in the payment step, but also on product pages, in the footer, on the page that lists accepted methods, in the FAQ and in order confirmation emails. If those places drift apart, the shopper has to decide at the last step whether two names mean the same thing. Fast’s merchants had to do the same work in ten days. With a planned change you have months, which only helps if someone owns the list.
Run the removal test before a provider runs it for you
Write down every element of your checkout that comes from a third party: express buttons, the payment methods and their logos, an address lookup, an embedded payment form. For each one, note every page and email where it appears and who in your team would hear first if it changed or stopped.
Then, in a test environment, switch each one off in turn and place an order on a phone as a returning customer. Check that the layout holds without it, that the ordinary route to checkout stays in view, that the basket survives and that no page still points to an option that is not there. Where the result is an empty space, a broken row of buttons or a dead end, fix the page now, while the option still works. The day it stops working is not the day to find out what your checkout looks like without it.
Sources: paymentsdive.com, wfae.org (NPR), fintechfutures.com and epicompany.eu
