Amazon's Dash buttons are no longer

Amazon has stopped selling Dash buttons, the $ 5 plastic chips that Prime customers could use to instantly rearrange basic household items, CNET announced Thursday.

The Dash buttons were launched in 2015 and, at the time of their demise, there were hundreds of options. Stick a Tide button on your washing machine and instantly reorganize the detergent when you miss it. Paste a Charmin button on the wall of your bathroom and instantly rearrange the toilet paper. Fridge: Soylent, Mucinex, Goldfish, Red Bull, various coconut waters, all brands of garbage bags. Play-Doh, Nerf pellets, diapers, soup. According to CNET, condoms, pet food, ink for printers and paper towels were the biggest hits.

What might challenge you about this setup is that a Meow Mix or Slim Jim button is a hideous home décor. Or, as the motherboard said in 2016, "If the Dash buttons become very popular, they will be an environmental disaster – they are $ 5 disposable electronics; most of them will probably end up in the trash one day. This day is today!

The currently used dashboard buttons will still work for the moment. Unfortunately, a book entitled Amazon Dash Buttons: a complete directory (volume 1), published in January 2017, is already sold out. (He especially had positive reviews!) You'll have to think of another way to commemorate this time of pilling our living spaces with the logos of diaper brands and over-the-counter medications.

Daniel Rausch, vice president of Amazon's smart home division, told CNET: "There is no doubt that [the] The main mission of the Dash buttons was successful. This fundamental mission was to familiarize people with the idea of ​​making purchases via their connected home, rather than exclusively in stores, browsers or applications.

According to Amazon, the virtual dash buttons on her website and the option to purchase by addressing her intelligent assistant, Alexa, have become more popular. Many smart devices – washing machines, printers, refrigerators, etc. – also have built-in Dash replenishment services that allow them to order supplies again. Dash buttons are no longer relevant. Rausch calls them "a great stepping stone" to "a future where the house [is] taking care of itself, including restocking everyday items, for which customers prefer not to worry. "

This story, although tidy, is not entirely true. As Recode's Rani Molla mentioned in November, voice assistants like Alexa and Google had not yet found their "true calling", and they were certainly not used to making a lot of purchases. "Most surveys show that only about 20 percent of smart speaker users have ever used their device to make a purchase," wrote Molla. "The number of monthly shops is half as much." Another poll she found revealed that between January and August 2018, only 2% of Alexa users had done a survey. single purchase via the wizard, and that another yet indicated that less than 1% of Americans prefer to buy on a smart speaker.

To be fair, Molla also noted that voice technology "has been adopted faster than almost any other technology in history." So, it may only be a few years before people really feel like ordering things with their smart speakers. RBC Capital Markets expects that selling voice on Alexa will yield $ 5 billion a year by 2020.

But Amazon's message about stopping the Dash button highlights the fact that they were declared illegal in Germany – the company's second largest market – in January. According to the court, having a button without updated price information in real time on what you order is in violation of consumer protection laws. When you buy something, you have the right to know how much it costs. At the time, Amazon told The Verge: "This decision is not just about innovation, it also prevents customers from knowingly choosing for themselves whether a service such as Dash Button a convenient way to shop. "

The German Federal Cartel Office also launched an antitrust investigation against Amazon at the end of 2006, similar to the European Union. While the European Union was interested in collecting sales data from Amazon, Germany was more interested in how it functioned as a "guardian", becoming both the largest retailer and the largest market of other retailers in the online space.

Eliminating a ridiculous product for which the regulators put the beef in public is a very simple and obvious way to eliminate some pressure, and is not a pretty naive celebration of the transition to the voicemail service.