I know this is going against the grain, but the one-click patent wasn't obvious to me. When I first enabled it on my amazon account and I clicked the link I *didn't expect the transaction to be complete*. I'm a pretty bright software engineer working at a startup, and I honestly didn't comprehend how it worked until I saw it. I assumed that it would be one click followed by a confirmation.
On reflection, I realized that it was because when looking at how to do an e-commerce system no matter how short you try to make the checkout process you want to include a confirmation. It would be dangerous not to do so. The innovation seems to be that you can order with one-click and then, to make it not dangerous, you can cancel within an hour or so. I don't know whether it's patent-worthy, but it's at least clever to allow error correction after the fact instead of forcing a check before.
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I know this is going against the grain, but the one-click patent wasn't obvious to me. When I first enabled it on my amazon account and I clicked the link I *didn't expect the transaction to be complete*. I'm a pretty bright software engineer working at a startup, and I honestly didn't comprehend how it worked until I saw it. I assumed that it would be one click followed by a confirmation.
On reflection, I realized that it was because when looking at how to do an e-commerce system no matter how short you try to make the checkout process you want to include a confirmation. It would be dangerous not to do so. The innovation seems to be that you can order with one-click and then, to make it not dangerous, you can cancel within an hour or so. I don't know whether it's patent-worthy, but it's at least clever to allow error correction after the fact instead of forcing a check before.