Amazon Dash Buttons bring one-click shopping to your kitchen, bathroom
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Amazon has had one-click ordering on its website for ages, but now it鈥檚 bringing that function directly into your house.
On Tuesday, Amazon introduced , small plastic devices with white buttons on one end and built-in Wi-Fi chips that let users reorder specific products with a single click. Mount a Dash Button somewhere in the bathroom, and the next time you鈥檙e running low on toilet paper, click the button to have more delivered to your door.
Dash Buttons will be available for 18 commonly-used products at first, including paper towels, coffee, baby food, detergent, and (of course) mac and cheese. Each individual button will order a specific product, and they can be mounted or hung near where those items are stored in a user鈥檚 house. The buttons themselves will be free, Amazon says, and their built-in batteries will last for years.
Eventually any company will be able to offer their own Dash Button, and Amazon users can customize exactly what each one does through Amazon鈥檚 website. You could have one button that, when pressed, orders a box of 24 servings of Kraft mac and cheese, and another that orders six new Gillette razor blades. Amazon will only fill one order at a time, so your doorstep won鈥檛 be flooded with boxes if you (or your kids) press the button multiple times in a row. You鈥檒l also receive an automatic notification on your phone every time an order is placed, giving you an opportunity to cancel the order if you didn鈥檛 mean to place it.
The Dash platform doesn鈥檛 stop at allowing customers to reorder products, however 鈥 it also allows products to keep themselves in stock. Certain devices, including Brother printers and Brita water pitchers, will be able to order new parts 鈥 such as more ink or additional water filters 鈥 automatically when they notice their supplies are running low. When a printer sees that its ink levels are running low, for example, it鈥檒l automatically place an Amazon order for a refill to be delivered to the user鈥檚 house, without that user having to do anything at all.
Over at Wired, writer David Pierce shares how his desk lamp when it sensed its current bulb was about to die. 鈥淲hen it discovered the current bulb had just 48 hours of life, it said its goodbyes, moved on, and quickly logged into Amazon and bought me another one,鈥 Mr. Pierce writes. 鈥淭his is the future according to Amazon.鈥
The Dash Button program is invite-only for now; Amazon Prime members can to join the program and receive up to three Dash Buttons. Presumably, the program will open up to any Amazon Prime member who wants to use it, and Amazon will allow a customer to install as many Dash Buttons as he or she wishes. The gadgets are an expansion of Amazon鈥檚 existing Dash remote-scanning service, which allows customers to order groceries using a small Wi-Fi-enabled .