Amazon has announced a quirky home ordering tool, which will help Prime members in the United States ensure they always have enough of the household essentials.
The Wi-Fi connected Amazon Dash buttons - which are free to Prime members - can be affixed anywhere around the house and, when pushed will instantly place an order via the Amazon mobile app.
The idea is that users can know they’re running low on household items and press the button to reorder there and then, while they remember.
So, users can stick an adhesive button on the washing machine, coffee maker, next to the bathroom cabinet, next to the nappy drawer, etc.
Users won’t have to do anything else, as the company already has their credit card details and previous orders stating size and quantity on file. All they need to do is push the button and hey presto, a fresh supply of laundry detergent shows up at the door a week later.
Amazon will send out an order alert to the users phone, and it’ll only respond to the first press. These are important fail-safes if the household has children who like to press a lot of buttons.
The Dash Buttons have today launched with 18 brand partners and, while this will help ensure that they’re free, it will limit shoppers to ordering only that company’s product. For example, there’s a Huggies Dash button, one for Gillette, Bounty, Tide and so on.
Perhaps a future extension of this would be a programmable series of dash buttons Prime members could configure to reorder anything they want from Amazon.com?
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The button scheme is not to dissimilar to the existing Dash wand-like barcode scaner, which allows the firm’s Amazon Fresh customers to scan products when they run out, or use voice ordering to add them to a shopping list.
Amazon has plans to take easy home ordering even further with the announcement of a Dash Replenishing Service, which will allow electronics manufacturers to build the functionality into their own wares.
You can check out the new Dash Buttons in the video below.