Amazon Dash and the next consumer revolution

Amazon is expanding its Dash button to just about any brand, effectively making the service free: the button costs $4.99, but is reimbursed with the first purchase. At present there are buttons for more than 500 products made by 29 different brands, but those figures are expected to increase rapidly once companies see the potential.

It may not be easy to understand the importance of this announcement if you don’t live in an area covered by Amazon Fresh, but it’s worth taking a closer look. Dash is only available at the moment for users of Amazon Prime, a flat-rate delivery services that reaches more than 20 million people in the United States who consistently consume twice as much as the rest of Amazon’s users. Besides that, you need to live in an area covered by Amazon Fresh, only available at certain cities in the United States, although it is soon expected to open in London. The cost of the logistics at Amazon Fresh is still being tested.

Amazon Prime and Amazon Fresh are constantly being monitored by the company to see how they perform and whether the model can be adapted to other cities. The buttons are very much a part of the so-called internet of things, or IoT, a tiny entity with a long battery life (it’s also been hacked for other purposes) and that at the press of a button, to put an article in your basket, from where it will be delivered to your door on the next delivery round, which could be the same day, depending on where you live.

Dash offers a wide range of products, many of which are no-brainers for subscribers: household goods and foodstuffs; the kind of items we just buy automatically, often before they have even run out. In my house, for example, we chalk up on a board things we need to buy, and then take a smartphone photo of it.

What happens when buying these kinds of products is as simple as pressing a button as they start to run out, and we get the goods within 24 hours? Well, we’re probably talking about the biggest change to consumption in recent decades, something that could change the habits of an entire generation, while posing major challenges to the distribution sector: Amazon is already bigger than Walmart.

Has anybody really stopped to think about the magnitude of change we’re talking about here in terms of our shopping habits? What will be the impact of Amazon taking such a large share of our spending? And what about how the service’s freeing up more of our time?

It’s as simple as clicking on an image of the product we normally buy, and that product appearing on our doorstep, optimizing the delivery cost, or reducing it through a flat-rate fee. This is no fad, and has the potential to spread rapidly, and not just to the tech-oriented readers of this page, but into anybody’s home, allowing them to make purchases at the click of a button. And what about all those brands that for years have struggled to make sure that their products were given the best spot on supermarket shelves? We’re talking about a revolution here…

(En espa?ol, aquí)