Amazon solved this in 1999. South African checkouts haven't caught up yet

A customer bought from your store two weeks ago. Today they're back. And your checkout is asking them for their sixteen-digit card number, expiry date, CVV and then an OTP they have to wait for while hoping the SMS arrives before the page times out.

Same customer. Same card. Same merchant. Treated like a stranger.

This isn't a minor inconvenience. It's a revenue leak and it's been a solved problem for nearly thirty years that South African business are missing.

The button Amazon patented in 1999

In September 1999, Amazon was granted US Patent 5,960,411 for what it called 1-Click payments. The claim was deceptively narrow: a method to buy something on the internet by pressing a single button, without filling in a form or confirming a cart. Apple licensed it for iTunes for a reported one million dollars. Barnes & Noble fought it in court and lost a holiday season.

The patent expired in 2017. By then it didn't matter - every serious online merchant had already built the same capability into their checkout. One tap for returning customers became the default experience of online shopping across most of the world.

Most of the world. Not most of South Africa.

What happens behind the scenes of a “1 Click Payment?”

The button is simple. What sits behind it isn't, but it doesn't need to be your problem to understand. In short: the card is stored securely, the bank is signalled that this is a known customer, and the authentication from the first purchase carries forward. The bank recognises the relationship and waves the transaction through, often without firing an OTP at all.

Our merchant data shows that when that infrastructure is in place, returning customers convert at 10–15% higher rates. Same cards, same banks, same customers but the checkout architecture is the difference.

Why the OTP problem hits South Africa harder

South African banks vary widely in how they handle payment authentication. Some are fast and app-based. Others still rely on SMS which drops, delays, or arrives after the customer has already given up and closed the tab. A returning customer on a properly saved card skips that step entirely. Every customer abandoning a checkout while waiting for an OTP is a sale you missed out on.

What's coming and why now is the right moment to act

The merchants who already have saved-card infrastructure in place will benefit immediately and twice over; frictionless checkout on top of a returning customer base they've already built. Those who don't act will be catching up while competitors convert better.

Twenty-seven years after Amazon patented the button, the capability is standard infrastructure across the globe. For South African merchants, building it now isn't getting ahead of the curve, it's closing a gap that's been costing you revenue, one abandoned checkout at a time.