Amazon has built a booming business of making it easy to buy things online. It has a patented one-click ordering mechanism. It offers subscription-style services. And on Tuesday, Amazon unveiled a pilot program that allows customers to order items with the push of a single physical button.
But what is perhaps more important than the button is the underlying technology, which is not just about letting people order things easily, but also largely about letting them reorder things easily.
The program, Amazon Dash, is a partnership with a handful of consumer brands like Bounty, Gillette and Tide — made by companies that offer “important things you always run low on,” such as paper towels and razor blades. Press a button on a small, pill-shaped device connected to Wi-Fi and receive a bottle of laundry detergent on your doorstep two days later.
Amazon’s theory is that it is simple to press a Tide-branded button stuck to your washing machine when you are running low on detergent. You might forget to reorder detergent later on, when you’re not staring at the spin cycle.
Amazon’s move is important, if not a bit outrageous. After seeing single-purpose hardware built just for ordering more toilet paper, some people on Twitter wondered if Amazon Dash was an early April Fools’ Day prank. (Amazon confirmed it is a real product.)
Buried in Amazon’s release documentation is a description of the Dash Replenishment Service, or D.R.S., a way to build reordering products from Amazon directly into household devices.
For example, Whirlpool, one of Amazon’s test partners, will soon offer a washing machine that detects when you are running low on detergent and automatically order a new box for you from Amazon. Quirky, the online retail and manufacturing start-up, will sell a smart coffee pot that can reorder beans from Amazon before you run out. The idea with Dash is that the coffee pot will order beans, coffee filters and a water filter — and be able to measure the use of all three and order each one separately when needed.
Initially, the program will pair with only a few device makers that plan to build the replenishment service into their products.
But Amazon’s description serves as a call to arms for developers, a bet that the future of at least some of Amazon’s retail operations will rely on the proliferation of interconnected smart devices, the so-called Internet of Things. In short: The more connected devices there are hooked up to D.R.S., the more people may avoid their local grocery store and order their everyday items from Amazon instead.
This is classic Amazon business strategy. The company makes little to no money on some projects, like sales of its Kindle Fire tablet, but instead pushes it as a portal for customers to order more things like books, movies and music from Amazon. Similarly, while Amazon would most likely not make money on device sales from partner manufacturers, it could see increased demand through automated ordering.
There is another added benefit. Amazon is one of the world’s largest data-driven retailers, collecting huge amounts of information on the things we buy and how often we buy them. If Amazon’s connected devices service takes off, it could provide the company with much more data on the types of things we regularly shop for.
Of course, all this is a long way from coming to fruition, if it ever does. Amazon Dash is invite-only at the moment, and Internet-connected devices have yet to catch on in the mainstream.
Still, Amazon’s ambitions seem large. The company says it wants to work with device makers of all sizes, from Maytag to inventors tinkering in the garage. For now, the partners are limited, but the company said the service will be publicly available in the fall.