171–180 of 262 posts
Can easily see this evolving into an Amazon price comparison tool for mobile use. Maybe I get a flash discount if the GPS has me standing in a Best Buy already.
Listening to a young child carefully pronounce words for the narration was a bit distracting and slightly irritating. A sentence or so would be fine, but narrating the whole video was an exercise in patience. Or do I just have a cold, black heart?
Sorry, you have a cold, black heart. I liked it.
So assumedly this will work in a store also? Could I go 'grocery shopping' at Whole Foods and end up having everything shipped to me by Amazon for cheaper? Can easily see this evolving into an Amazon price comparison tool for mobile use. Maybe I get a flash discount if the GPS has me standing in a Best Buy already.
I actually thought that this is exactly what it was for when reading the first few bullet points and didn't think of home first, just a "Oh wow, they're making showroom shopping even easier."
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And here's a few more. Dash device is an exemplar of a service in the same way that a Kindle device is. Amazon retains the option to later go the other way too, but while the constraint is still on the supply side (limited markets) this device serves to fix the service as a thing and generate publicity. Also, the platform is controlled by Amazon. Free from interference by Apple, Google, OEM or carrier. Wifi and inter…
noting that a $299/year Amazon fresh subscription is required to play, this thing probably amortizes itself and then some pretty quickly. (Increases frequency of orders, increases number of things ordered, likely to increase retention of users ie length of subscription.)
HN'ers asking why this isn't a cell phone app take note - this exemplifies why we (geeks) don't make good use cases for consumer tech and we should always be careful looking to our own habits and values when in a Product Development role. We're rarely the target customer and rarely behave like "average Joe". We're naturally resistant to superfluous redundancy ("My phone can already snap a barcode, I don't need a sepa…
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Alternatively, if you had an 'always listening phone' like the Moto X, your flow might go something like this: Option A 1. Ask your phone to buy {name of item} 2. Screen turns on, tap to confirm your purchase Option B 1. Find the Dash device 2. Scan the item (if you haven't already discarded or recycled it, and haven't ruined the barcode in the process of opening it) 3. Confirm and pay To me, Dash feels like a (possi…
> 1. Ask your phone to buy {name of item} Outside theory, I don't see that working very well in the real world currently. On amazon fresh website, there are currently 229 results for "green apples" 8 results for "granny smith apples" 2 results for "1 granny smith apples" Same with ham, eggs, or any other products really. Sure, the user could be more specific, but then it gets a lot more work and problematic than simp…
Next - presuming that you bought something from Amazon, why do you need the barcode? If I recently bought and/or regularly buy granny smith apples from Fresh, it's quite easy to figure out the most probable buying targets for queries of "apples." Further, if I regularly buy 5 different types of granola bars, now I can use one query and a checkbox instead of scanning each box individually. (Sidebar: how do you use Dash to scan produce that you've already consumed? Do you have to keep the containers around?)
In the big scheme of things, figuring out which product you probably want to buy based on your buying history (and that of others) is a trivial problem compared to the other problems that had to be solved for "always listening" and such. Amazon's job ends up being the easiest in that stack.
"Apples" ... next day what shows up, exactly? 6 granny smith apples? a 15 pound bag of golden delicious? 3 MacBooks pro? ummm
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Even if they hadn't expanded beyond Seattle, Seattle is their "home market" where lots of their employees live and a rather good market for a wide-availability grocer. Fred Meyer stores nor its QFC sibling hold a candle to any halfway-decent actual-Kroger from back home. Safeway is just Tom Thumb with a 20% markup. This isn't exactly the Dallas/Fort Worth grocery region, with 11 (yes, eleven) full-service grocery cha…
Here is my problem: it's been in this perpetual beta mode since 2007. At some point they should be done with all the market research there is to do and either go big or stop wasting resources on building gadgets for it.
Freshdirect is NYC area and Philly, Peapod has a few markets but they are part of a grocery chain so everything but the last mile is take care of logistics wise. It seems like figuring out how to do it at scale and be competitive is exactly what Amazon is doing. If they can make it almost as cheap but have compelling additional features then it helps them roll it out wider.
I hope that's a bottle opener on the top.
"Apples" ... next day what shows up, exactly? 6 granny smith apples? a 15 pound bag of golden delicious? 3 MacBooks pro? ummm
You have to confirm the order.