By: Brad Giles, Vice President of Channel Marketing at Cayan

Amazon’s 1-Click ordering revolutionized e-commerce checkout and set the bar for what customers have come to think of as an easy shopping experience. It’s become such a staple for regular Amazon users that the company even expanded the concept beyond the virtual world of the internet—now, many people place Amazon Dash Buttons throughout their home and use them to reorder common household supplies with the push of a button.

What many people don’t realize is that Amazon has a patent on 1-click—not just the technology, but the very concept. No company in the United States is allowed to sell online with just one click unless they get licensed by Amazon. Apple, for instance, licensed 1-click ordering from Amazon in 2000.

But all of that will be over soon. Amazon’s patent expires in September 2017. And that’s a big deal for anyone working in e-commerce. Whether you’re working with huge national chains or local merchants, you’re going to need to offer one-click.

One-click checkout is about to be everywhere, because removing friction from the buying process is perhaps the biggest priority for modern businesses. If you’re working with brick-and-mortar stores, for instance, this has meant that you need to offer in-aisle checkout solutions, mobile payments, and faster credit card processing.

In the online space, where it’s not uncommon to see cart abandonment rates of 70%, a more streamlined checkout is always the goal. The holy grail for e-commerce is safe and speedy one-click checkout, with stored shipping and payment information that’s fully secure. If checkout can be simpler and faster for shoppers, there will be a noticeable boost on the bottom line for merchants.

To prepare for one-click payments, you need to be sure you have an e-commerce offering that can handle it. There are two fundamental parts to one-click that you should already have in place: retaining customer payment preferences securely, and ensuring payment preferences are up-to-date.

Enabling card-on-file payment and storing shipping data is crucial to a high conversion rate, but it’s also an area where security is truly essential. You must be sure you have the proper systems in place to securely store this information.

But beyond that, you must be prepared to handle another significant obstacle: changing credit cards numbers and expiration dates. When this happens with card-on-file purchases, the customer’s checkout flow in interrupted to ask for new payment credentials—another hurdle for the customer to climb.      Some companies offer card account updating features, which can retrieve new credit cards numbers and expiration dates when old cards are replaced. This makes one-click payments a far more effective solution—but not all companies have such capabilities.

One-click payments are going to be in high demand soon. You need to be sure you’re working with an e-commerce provider that can handle it.