Amazon Aims to Make Shopping Even Lazier With New Dash Buttons

Amazon’s Dash program will give Prime customers programmable buttons they can position around the house for one-push instant purchases.

Back when I was a kid in the far off past of the 1990s, shopping kind of sucked. You had to load up into the car, drive yourself out to your nearest mall and then browse around hoping to find the thing you were looking for. Or, worse, you could order something from a catalog and then spend weeks waiting for it to show up. Nowadays, the internet has made buying things so easy that, with a good TV show and a comfy chair, the act of shopping can practically become a form of home entertainment. Now, Amazon hopes to make it even easier with its new Dash button program.

Announced on its site today, the Dash program will give Amazon Prime members the ability to order branded buttons that they can position around their homes and then use to order automatic refills of their favorite products. For instance, if you use Bounty paper towels, you could order a Bounty button to put in your kitchen. When you notice you’re running low, you could push it to signal Amazon that you need more. The company would then process an automatic order of your preferred Bounty product and ship it out to you. The buttons will be programmable using the Amazon phone app, making it possible to fill your home with an entire slew of “buy now” buttons that keep you from ever running out of your favorite products again. It will even include built-in restrictions to make sure you don’t wind up with multiple orders.

Speaking as someone who constantly forgets to buy things when they run low, the very idea of this has me excited. Granted, making it even easier to shop online could have some bad ramifications for already ailing physical retailers. That said, I’m currently imagining a world where I never run out of cat food/garbage bags/Windex/diapers/etc. and, I have to say, it’s looks pretty incredible. Unfortunately, Dash is currently invite only. That said, Amazon hopes to eventually expand it to include its entire customer base, Prime and otherwise. If you’re interested in landing yourself an invitation you can apply for one on the main Amazon website.

Source: Yahoo