I bought an Amazon Dash button last week. Obviously.
Ordering one is easy enough, it costs £4.99 which gets deducted off your first purchase.
I chose Andrex as that’s the only brand I could us using in this household. We don’t really buy the other brands listed.
Setting it up isn’t as simple as I’d expected. Takes a few goes, lots of bluetooth syncing issues. Many other tech things have this issue, but it felt like a big overhead for some toilet rolls.
You can choose which Andrex product you’d like from a small range. In common with Prime Now and Add Ons and other speedy Amazon services it seems like there’s a minimum spend of around £15. That’s a lot of toilet rolls.
I pressed it late Thursday night and on Saturday morning 45 toilet rolls turned up.
Some thoughts:
A completely customisable one would be incredible.
Presumably that will come.
It looks awful.
Looks ok in the photos, but it’s bigger than you think and there would be no way I’d want this in my bathroom stuck on the wall. The logos are just too ugly. That’s an odd thing to write when bathrooms are notoriously filled with ugly logos and I could conceivably change my mind with subtler logos. This isn’t just a designer’s comment. It feels weird.
The experience is strangely cold. And I'm an easily excitable early adopter type.
Two points here:
1. I press a button and 24 hours later the thing I want arrives on my door. It knows exactly which one I want, it knows my address and it debits my account. That is an incredible experience.
2. Nothing really happens when you press the button. A little green dot flashes. 24 hours is a long time to wait for something to happen after you’ve pressed a button. It’s all a bit of an anti-climax.
This raises all sorts of awkward questions for brands and “customer experience” people. The worst thing Amazon could do would be to layer on lots of meaningless jokes and ideas. An app you had to fire up that had an animation of Andrex puppy loading a lorry would be an awful idea - for example. But you can imagine the temptation.
The experience is brilliant, really. Maybe the button needs to make a noise. Maybe we’ll just get used to it. I am not advocating more "brand experience". Far from it. Please don't write a think piece claiming I think Amazon needs more "brand experience". I don't.
Maybe it's just feels odd because it's a new behaviour. I could imagine a dozen of these in a garage, or maybe an airing cupboard and on Sunday afternoon you go round pressing them as required.
Anyway.
It feels like it would be more magical if they played with the economics, and there is much more eloquent writing on the economics, innovation and marketing impacts of this from Simon Wardley and Matt Webb. This is a snowflake on an iceberg controlled by Amazon.
And remember, “in the future every product will carry a buy button."
One last thing. Whether you love this or hate this, the point is that Amazon is a company that can make this happen and almost no one else can right now.
They are fascinating, but a few too many hoops to jump through for my liking (you have to be a prime member, for example, then the £15 minimum, I couldn't store 15 loo rolls in my house). However, there is a PlayDoh button, one of the key consumables in our house!
Isn't there and email confirmation that your loo roll has been ordered? Or tie it to some app to send a confirmation?
Though really I'm not sure why this couldn't be implemented as "virtual dash buttons". I'm not the only guy who has his phone in his pocket when visiting the loo I'm sure, or the kitchen etc? It might be 2 more button presses, phone unlock, launch app, press Andrex button. You could get 16 buttons on a screen so no swiping or searching and you could get a confirmation via the app that all was happening?
Posted by: Kieran Harrod | Sep 05, 2016 at 10:25