Honestly, I don't know. It could be that smaller online retailers were afraid of the inevitable rise in returns, chargebacks, and other customer-service hassles that would accompany any measures that encourage impulse buying. I know I would be.
While the idea of one-click ordering is obvious, it takes some nontrivial business infrastructure to make it safe and robust. You need to be able to consolidate separate orders placed within a brief timeframe, you need to allow your customers to view and edit their existing orders and fix accidental ones without human intervention... and probably most important, you need to be large and well-known enough to be trusted by your customers to retain the financial and personal information needed to execute one-click orders.
The idea was indeed a ballsy one, and it took some real work on Amazon's part to make it happen successfully. But it was still an obvious idea, it wasn't the least bit creative, and it didn't deserve patent protection.
Hard work on my part shouldn't, by itself, entitle me to stop you from doing the same.
While the idea of one-click ordering is obvious, it takes some nontrivial business infrastructure to make it safe and robust. You need to be able to consolidate separate orders placed within a brief timeframe, you need to allow your customers to view and edit their existing orders and fix accidental ones without human intervention... and probably most important, you need to be large and well-known enough to be trusted by your customers to retain the financial and personal information needed to execute one-click orders.
The idea was indeed a ballsy one, and it took some real work on Amazon's part to make it happen successfully. But it was still an obvious idea, it wasn't the least bit creative, and it didn't deserve patent protection.
Hard work on my part shouldn't, by itself, entitle me to stop you from doing the same.