I like to buy clothes and furniture at the store where I can try on stuff to make sure it fits and actually sit on chairs to see if they’re comfortable. When it comes to buying my laundry detergent, mac and cheese, and toilet paper, however, I don’t require that up close and personal experience.
Nonetheless, my husband and I typically shop for these kinds of things in person at Costco, the grocery store, or Target (News - Alert). But Amazon is trying to change the habits of people like us by removing the friction of ordering such items online. It’s doing that via the introduction of the Dash Button.
Amazon’s Dash Button is a small, consumer product-branded thing about the size of two thumb drives that lets consumers easily reorder from Amazon popular items such as Clorox wipes, Cottonelle toilet tissue, Kraft macaroni and cheese, Gatorade, Gerber baby formula, and Tide laundry detergent. Just touch the Wi-Fi-connected Dash Button, and the product-specific order is placed; the goods arrive on your doorstep the following day.
This model beautifully reflects the trend toward removing friction from the sales process to get customers to make a purchase. Of course, consumers need to go to the trouble of seeking out and paying for the devices, which sell for $4.99 each, and then setting them up. –This no doubt will be too great a hurdle for most folks, probably including me. But for younger people, like my daughter, who tend to be very comfortable with all things connected, who strongly dislike going shopping, and who are all about efficiency, the Dash Button looks to be a perfect fit.
The idea here is that a person, perhaps a busy professional, would put one of the Kraft-branded devices on the fridge so when he ran out of mac and cheese, he could simply hit the button to order a new box. Likewise, a new mother might put a Tide-branded device in the laundry room or a Huggies-branded button in the nursery so if she ran out of detergent or diapers, she wouldn’t have to take the baby out or get on the computer, but instead could simply touch a button. Viola, friction removed!
Something about this reminds me of the new campaign in which the actress from Modern Family orders a pizza simply by texting the emoji of a slice to Domino’s. Again, the idea here seems to be making it as easy as possible for people – especially young people, who are on their smartphones and texting all the time anyway – to order pizza. How simple!
Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
