Have you discovered Amazon Dash? Designed for use with Amazon Fresh (Amazon’s online grocery shopping store), this revolutionary new shopping device promises to take the hassle out of grocery shopping.
Let’s face it, food shopping is a necessary but laborious task; even with the rise of internet shopping, surfing through streams of products and offers takes time and effort. Amazon Dash hopes to offer consumers a new kind of online grocery shopping experience, and its easy design means the whole family can use it.
Simply hang the device somewhere in your kitchen and when you run out of your day-to-day supermarket favourites, scan or say what they are and they’ll be added to your basket quickly and efficiently, or use separate Dash buttons that can be ordered for different products. You can keep adding to your list too, until, for example, the end of the week and then organise your delivery – or you can scan and order straightaway.
Launched in the US last year and in the UK this summer, recognition for Amazon Dash is quickly growing, with US orders via the Dash button increasing threefold in the last two months alone. The number of different Dash buttons is on the rise (with over 150 brands and growing available) and customer reviews on both sides of the pond show that customers are responding positively to this new take on how we shop for our groceries. Powered by Amazon’s Dash Replenishment Service (DRS), the buttons can be set directly into products and set via Amazon’s smartphone app for Android and iOS (connecting via Bluetooth or ultrasonics).
Daniel Rausch, director of Amazon Dash explains: ‘There is no retail therapy in buying toilet roll or bin bags. It’s just work. We wanted to take the one-click experience from our website and put it right where people need it most, in the home, near the products that run out. So that buying them is no longer work.’
Amazon has firmly staked its place in the highly lucrative online grocery shopping market with Amazon Dash, and it’s appropriate to claim that they’re even changing the way we shop for our supermarket essentials. In fact, other brands, such as Carling, are taking note and are using this ‘connected button’ technology in their own marketing.
Designed to be placed in the fridge, the Carling button works in the same way as the Amazon Dash. It syncs to a smartphone app, and works with the UK’s top four online supermarket giants – Tesco, Asda, Morrisons or Sainsbury’s – to automatically add Carling beer to online shopping baskets, with one simple touch of the button.
Will more brands follow suit? Aside from adding products to your online shopping basket with ease, another lucrative reason to embrace the button is because it increases brand visibility. Carling’s own research found that when British shoppers browsed online grocery stores, there is usually a maximum number of products on a page (10) and one in three people didn’t bother to click beyond the first page, opting for one of the options available to them on page one instead.
Alpesh Mistry, customer marketing director at Molson Coors explains, ‘the Carling beer button is designed to tackle the increasing problem of brand visibility online, and to drive both brand and retailer loyalty.’
The Amazon Dash device and Carling’s button are more than just a gimmick, and we could soon see other brands developing their own connected buttons for both ease of use and that all important brand visibility and loyalty.
So, if the thought of grocery shopping and searching for your supermarket favourites fills you with dread, try Amazon Dash and push those buttons!
