Amazon is expanding its lineup of Dash Buttons with more than 50 new brands — including an expansion into toys through the addition of Play-Doh and Nerf — touting the growth of the initiative despite a skeptical report about its prospects.
Dash Buttons, introduced last year, are dedicated devices that let Amazon Prime members quickly reorder specific products by pushing a button in their home or office. A report in the Wall Street Journal said consumers have been largely cool to the idea, citing interviews with consumer products executives who said the devices were “more vital as a marketing tool than a product-delivery system.”
Amazon this morning said the frequency of orders made through the Dash buttons has doubled in the last three months, now amounting to more than two orders a minute. That translates into 2,880 orders a day, or more than 1 million orders a year — significant, but still a drop in the bucket in the context of the e-commerce giant’s larger online retail business.
The company says it now has more than 150 brands in the program. New Dash buttons include household, food and consumer brands such as Campbell’s Soup, Cascade, Clif Bar, Dial Liquid Hand Soap, FIJI Water, FoodSaver, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Crackers, Hubert’s Lemonade, Lavazza, Mentos, Nutiva, Puffs, Quilted Northern, simplehuman, Trident, and V8 Vegetable Juice.
In addition to expanding into toys with Play-Doh and Nerf, the company is getting into music with the addition of D’Addario guitar strings.
The WSJ reported that the number of participating brands has increased in part because Amazon has dropped an initiation fee of about $200,000 that it charged to the initial companies taking part in the Dash program.
Dash buttons cost $4.99 each, but customers get a credit for the same amount when they make their first order. Users set up the buttons in advance to order what they want, and get order alerts on their phone when they press the button, so they can cancel if they made a mistake.
On a related note, Amazon and its partners have been building automatic re-ordering directly into appliances and devices such as washing machines and water filters through the Amazon Dash Replenishment service.
