Buy a branded button for $5. Program your button. Place your button. Push button and it re-orders whatever you’d programmed it to re-order without further ado.
For example, buy a Tide button, program it to order 64 oz Tide Ultra. Put the button on your washing machine. When you’re running low while washing, press the button. In 2-3 days, Tide arrives at your door.
Would you use this? I live alone so I don’t go through stuff quickly at all. I could see this being useful for busy parents or other caretakers who are both busy and over-loaded with stuff to memorize. But if you live a kinda slow life like me, I don’t think it’s useful.
But I love new inventions like this What do you think?
Nope. I don’t want to be tied in (I slay myself) to one brand. Gimme something along these lines that when it’s running low asks to reorder the default, here’s an alternative or you can shop around. And it needs to be more than a single use product. Monitor a bunch of different things for reorder.
I really, really want to like it, but I can’t. I love the idea of it, but I’m not blindly orderng anything unless I know the price.
For example, one staple I do order from Amazon is a certain brand of doggie treat, because the Amazon price on them is about 25% lower than the local price. However, the prices tend to change - one month the lamb flavor is cheap, but the chicken is expensive, the next month that’s reversed. I highly doubt this button if going to be smart enough to realize my dogs don’t care about flavor and always order the cheap ones.
Given that in my experience, most of the stuff the Dash button is designed to sell have similar price fluctuations, it’s a big NO for me.
It seems like a stupid idea to me, especially the idea that you have to pay five bucks for the button. Plus how hard is it to remember to buy more laundry detergent or toilet paper or whatever?
I think you get $5 off your first order, Dewey Finn. I guess maybe it’s just a way to keep Amazon from having to front all of the costs of the buttons and never have people use them.
And some people just have fast lives, man! Too fast to shop!
A phone app with one click ordering from a programmable list of products would make sense. A different physical button for every product? That seems ridiculous and wasteful. How often would you have to change the battery or batteries?
Of course, this isn’t intended to increase consumer convenience. It’s intended to encourage impulse buying and to discourage comparison shopping.
This is not meant to make your life easier. It’s meant to make taking your money easier.
I read the wiki, and don’t see much difference in function between the cuecat and today’s QR readers. Granted, using a smartphone is easier than a dedicated (wired) device, but the concept seems the same. What am I missing?
What you’re missing is that it wasn’t a generic QR reader. It was designed to send you to a page based on the code scanned and, if I’m understanding it right, it only worked with special Cuecat bar codes.
Also, the business model depended on collecting info on what individual users scanned and it was aimed at a tech savvy user base, who naturally figured out how to hack it to avoid the data collection.
Also, most people who use a QR reader use it because it came with the phone, or only required downloading a free or inexpensive app. I can’t see many consumers buying a QR reader that plugs into a PC or tablet or whatever.
No, the Cuecat didn’t work only with their proprietary bar codes. After the company failed, I acquired a Cuecat when I bought Readerware software to build databases of my books, CDs and DVDs. The Cuecat could be used to read the ISBN bar code.
By the way, this seems a way to get people to shift some of their purchases from the supermarkets, Walmart and Target to Amazon. And my guess is that this stuff is the higher-margin stuff they sell.
By the way, it’s kind of funny how far afield Amazon is from where they started; I can’t remember the last time I ordered an actual book from them.
I was offered the buttons basically for free (the cost would be credited towards future Amazon buying). I looked into it and no it doesn’t work for me.
The main reason is that the buttons are specifically tied to products I don’t often buy and not loyal to. It is really a limited selection. I couldn’t find one that I would want a button for. If I could program the button for my product that would work. But I can see it from their point, it locks the consumer into a product (such as Tide), which is what Amazon wants to sell to tide, the locked in customer, and why the buttons are not user programmable. Amazon tried this ‘lock in’ before in another way with having a automatic reorder for some products which the person would get a discount.
Second reason is it’s really easy to reorder what I want on their web site by going to my previous orders page.
Third, pressing a button is too easy, I don’t want to get a package of 600 bottles of Tide because my nieces and nephew came over and found it fun to play doorbell with the button.
This, absolutely ^^^ Now, if the button had an LED screen that constantly showed the current price…
Their page says that they send a confirmation to your phone for every order and you can “easily cancel”. That, plus the “no additional order until the last one ships” would seem to limit that risk. If the safeguards work 100% of the time :rolleyes:
What do you think?