Amazon Dash

HN&#x27;ers asking why this isn&#x27;t a cell phone app take note - this exemplifies why we <i>(geeks)</i> don&#x27;t make good use cases for consumer tech and we should always be careful looking to our own habits and values when in a Product Development role.<p>We&#x27;re rarely the target customer and rarely behave like &quot;average Joe&quot;. We&#x27;re naturally resistant to superfluous redundancy <i>(&quot;My phone can already snap a barcode, I don&#x27;t need a separate device&quot;)</i> when consumers don&#x27;t even see the duplication let alone the issue. They don&#x27;t separate devices (or even apps) has having layers of similarity and just see things for their end functionality.<p>My mother would see a phone and apps as completely separate functionality to a physical device like this. She probably would have the Amazon Fresh scanner, the <i>(theoretical)</i> Google Shopping Express scanner and the <i>(also theoretical)</i> Whole Foods scanner and wouldn&#x27;t even consider the duplication, let alone be frustrated by it. She doesn&#x27;t care about the potential for an &quot;open standard&quot;&#x2F;&quot;common standard&quot;.<p>She also has an AppleTV and a ChromeCast connected to the same smart-TV that also has native apps within it <i>(she mostly uses the native apps)</i>. Again, she sees no issue with that and might even buy an Amazon FireTV if she felt it was more compelling for one use.<p>Ultimately we shouldn&#x27;t assume consumers value convergence, especially when it creates ever increasing complexity in user experience <i>(eg opening an app to snap a barcode vs pressing a single button on an Amazon Fresh scanner)</i><p>ADDED: If you don&#x27;t have parents that also work in tech, go visit them and just watch them use technology without prompting. Ask them about their experiences, their frustrations, their decisions behind purchasing specific equipment and downloading particular apps. It&#x27;s very insightful.

Based on the comments, I&#x27;m guessing few poeople here have ever worked retail and held a barcode scanner.<p>Break out your phone, load up your barcode scanning app (there&#x27;s 20 seconds right there even if the phone is in your pocket). Now try to actually scan something with it. You&#x27;ll spend another 30 seconds lining up the little on-screen window with the code, rotating things, waiting for the camera to focus, and even having to move to another location if you&#x27;re not in bright lighting. It&#x27;s a <i>terrible</i> experience and that&#x27;s why you don&#x27;t see stores checking people out using the camera of an iPad.<p>A barcode scanner, on the other hand, just works. You point it in the general vicinity of the barcode, press the button, and it&#x27;s scanned. You don&#x27;t have to perfectly align anything, be in specific lighting, or wait for a camera and an app. I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;ve seen cashiers run multiple things over a scanner in under a second.<p>Amazon Dash isn&#x27;t just a subset of your phone&#x27;s functionality. It&#x27;s a dedicated barcode scanner, which is hardware you don&#x27;t have on your phone.

Number of steps to scan grocery by phone:<p>1. Find your phone<p>2. Unlock<p>3. Swipe left to home page three or maybe four<p>4. Visually scan for the AmazonFresh icon and tap<p>5. Wait for loading<p>6. Start scanning action<p>7. Confirm and pay<p>Number of steps to scan grocery by Dash:<p>1. Get device from drawer or pantry<p>2. Press one button and scan<p>3. Confirm and pay<p>For the target demo (30+, married, households with children), option 2 wins hands down. Because you will easily be distracted and stop using option 1 and not complete checkout.<p>Amazon knows CPG and commerce better than you do.

For some reason this made me thing of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;CueCat</a>

My first thought: people are going to bring this to retail shops to get the benefits of brick-and-mortars shopping while benefiting from the low prices &#x2F; delivery of Amazon.<p>A lot of people already kind of do this. They go to a shop, find the items they like and look up on the web if they can get a cheaper price by ordering online.<p>This version of the product might not be so practical for this use case though since it requires a WiFi connection and can probably only scan AmazonFresh barcodes.

So assumedly this will work in a store also? Could I go &#x27;grocery shopping&#x27; at Whole Foods and end up having everything shipped to me by Amazon for cheaper?<p>Can easily see this evolving into an Amazon price comparison tool for mobile use. Maybe I get a flash discount if the GPS has me standing in a Best Buy already.

&quot;Dash ... works directly with your AmazonFresh account&quot;<p>Which means it is only available in three locations (SoCal&#x2F;SF&#x2F;Seattle).

Why is Amazon gold plating their fresh service when they didn&#x27;t manage to meaningfully expand it since 2007?

I&#x27;ve been expecting Tesco (UK) to do this for ages. They have supermarkets literally operating on this sort of device, you scan+bag as you go, and they have a decent national delivery service.

Amazon needs to scale Fresh in order for it to be more successful. On a micro level, scaling could come in one of 2 ways: (1)increase order frequency or (2)average order size.<p>(1) Order frequency - Right now, a typical customer likely picks up groceries when they&#x27;re out and it&#x27;s convenient. This very well could be on the commute home from work, later at night, etc. With Dash sitting around the kitchen, Amazon has now created a very tangible reminder in the form of the Dash device to order your groceries, rather than waiting until it pops into your mind (and possibly not buying on Amazon).<p>(2) Average order size - As someone posted above, it takes 1 or 2 button clicks to reorder an item using Dash. Compared to the current way of online grocery shopping, Dash eliminates a lot of possibilities of forgetting to reorder something you intended to, because it is so simple. Compared to on the PC when you may forget to browse the snacks category, for example, and you forget to order chips and cookies. Way less likely to happen with Dash.<p>This doesn&#x27;t address price concerns, but in terms of convenience for Amazon Fresh customers &amp; increasing Fresh orders&#x2F;order size, this seems like a massive win-win for Amazon and their customers.

I wonder if this will lead to showrooming of groceries, like Amazon&#x27;s done with books. The only thing preventing this is the wifi requirement, but of course one can already do this with their phone. Though it does make it even easier.

Anyone know the battery life&#x2F;lifetime of these? If it&#x27;s months, that&#x27;s a lot more convenient to keep in the pantry. As a kitchen appliance it makes a lot of sense, but I don&#x27;t have any muscle memory for &quot;charging&quot; appliances.

I hope that&#x27;s a bottle opener on the top.

Why would they make a device rather than an app to do this? Seems pretty awesome as a service though...if Amazon Fresh was available here.

Nice try NSA!<p>Seriously though, it worries me that there are more and more &#x27;listening devices&#x27; in my home.<p>We&#x27;ve seen what has happened recently with the NSA listening to calls. What is to stop the authorities getting a back door into all these devices and just recording everything?

I&#x27;m surprised this exists to be honest. Not because of smartphones, but because I thought RFID chips would be sufficiently disposable by now that we&#x27;d have smart refrigerators and trashcans. I had to buy a new refrigerator last year and I was struck by how many different kinds of ice dispensers there were (a feature in which I have no interest whatsoever) vs smart refrigerators. I found exactly one of the latter - the unfortunately named T9000 from Samsung (Komm vith me if you vant a snack...), which is really just a refrigerator with a tablet stuck on the front, didn&#x27;t do very much, was completely locked down (understandable) and cost $4000.

I like how it&#x27;s a separate device - it&#x27;s too bad it&#x27;s only available on the west coast though. AmazonFresh reminds me of &quot;Webvan&quot;. Webvan failed during the dot com bubble, maybe Amazon is trying to start this kind of business model up again. I think the grocery delivery service is a great idea, especially now with everyone being so connected. Webvan only failed because they expanded rapidy and weren&#x27;t able to attract customers at their speedy pace, plus back then not everyone was so connected.

Does anyone know how they connect to WiFi? There&#x27;s like two buttons and one beep for I&#x2F;O.<p>(Half joking: Or is it a Speak Friend And Enter kind of thing, where you have to speak the WiFi credentials.)

Has anyone else noticed that this completely rips off Hiku? Or is this repackaging the same product?<p><a href="http://hiku.us/what-is-hiku/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;hiku.us&#x2F;what-is-hiku&#x2F;</a>

Best idea ever, wow what a great product and functionality! This should be in every house! :-)<p>Amazon acts like a startup still. Good for them!

Grocery stores should be worried. Amazon is predator that will take on any market it thinks it can win. Pretty soon they will not only be competing against the store next door, but the Amazon grocery warehouse with all the advantages of scale and convenience.

How does this differ from people using the mobile app? Mainly for Amazon Fresh integration?

i think this is a big deal. When I am working in kitchen, i see lot of items needing refill, reordering etc...it is little cumbersome to stop your work, wash your hands and get the phone to take the note. Not to mention, once u pick your phone there are 100 hundred things going on - facebook, mails, texts etc to distract you for long time. Knowing this distraction, if I just say - &quot;OK, I will just remember in my brain and will not pick up phone&quot; then you know I never remember that task or things later. I think you can also use this device as your note taker incase you want to buy from somewhere else. Enjoy the convenience ;-)

Why was a separate physical device needed for this? It seems like a simple smartphone application would work just as well, if not better as I would assume virtually all of the target audience for this service already have a smartphone.

This is a cool service to integrate with AmazonFresh. A similar promising alternative is <a href="https://www.rosieapp.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rosieapp.com</a> ... It&#x27;s a pretty cool startup with similar goals.

You could also take it to a store and scan things there. See what you get, pay less.<p>I know someone who runs a book shop, and he frequently has people browse for books, only to buy them online later for slightly less.

Wait till a 2 year old gets ahold of it and scans everything 10 times.

And when you go to somebody else place, you like something, &quot;ok, I will add it to my Amazon shopping cart&quot;, etc... So many use cases this is amazing.

Sounds like this would only real be useful for packaged, processed goods. I&#x27;d have trouble trusting the quality of perishable items over the internet...

Now this feels like the future.<p>I am curious what the upgrade cycles of these products will end up being. Can Amazon charge a subscription and keep giving me a new one?

The :cue cat lives!

I see absolutely no reason why this couldn&#x27;t have been a mobile app with a bar code scanner and voice recognition...

How does the voice feature work? Is it computer voice recognition, or does your voice get sent to a person to interpret?

It&#x27;ll be interesting to see what Amazon does to continue to get more information on people&#x27;s shopping habits.

If someone has an invite, can you please send me one as well. I don&#x27;t have the Invite Code needed to participate.

If its real, this is going to revolutionize grocery shopping. Also, open up a new market for such devices.

When food became mp3&#x27;s — Amazon Dash &#x2F; Fresh = Apple iPod &#x2F; iTunes. Well done, Jeff.

Didn&#x27;t see this pointed out so far - The existing Amazon app can already scan bar codes.

So you zap your grocery needs with dash and flying robot delivers it within 24 hours....

This is the CueCat done right! Technology is similar but their is a clear use case.

&quot;Apples&quot;<p>...<p>next day what shows up, exactly?<p>6 granny smith apples?<p>a 15 pound bag of golden delicious?<p>3 MacBooks pro?<p>ummm

Amazon is making service backed devices. As opposed to selling them.

I like the simplified dedicated device for creating a low friction experience, however one downside of having this as a separate device rather than an app on your phone is that you are more likely to loose it, forget where you kept it, etc. etc.

I can&#x27;t believe this is not an April Fools&#x27; Joke.

Fruits and vegetables to not have a bare code, right ? How to make it simple for those fresh products then ?

How do I get a code?

disruptive innovation at it&#x27;s best.........

hook it up with an invite code :)

What a time to be alive.

Listening to a young child carefully pronounce words for the narration was a bit distracting and slightly irritating. A sentence or so would be fine, but narrating the whole video was an exercise in patience.<p>Or do I just have a cold, black heart?