Amazon's Dash Button turns one, triples available brands
Amazon's Dash Button turns one today, and to mark the occasion the e-commerce giant is touting a few progress milestones.
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Amazon says the number of brands in the Dash Button ecosystem have tripled to more than 100. In the last three months, Dash Button orders have grown by more than 75 percent and now take place at a staggering pace of over one order each minute.
Those numbers are pretty impressive for a product no one believed was real.
When news of the Dash Button first broke last year, on the eve of April Fool's, many were left wondering if Amazon was playing some elaborate prank on overeager tech journalists. After all, a product as seemingly bizarre and gimmicky as the Dash Button just begged for cynicism.
But Amazon's one-click buying system was the real deal, and the company has turned the Dash Button into an Internet of Things play through the development of the Dash Replenishment Service (DRS). The DRS can either be built into hardware directly to automatically order supplies when they run low, or exist as its own standalone button.
Last October, Amazon significantly widened the ecosystem of hardware partners participating in DRS, with Samsung, General Electric, Oster and a host of others signing up to build devices and appliances that can reorder products without any help at all. In January, the first batch of Dash-powered devices went live.
The latest brands to join the Dash Button bandwagon include Brawny, Charmin, Clorox, Doritos, Energizer, Lysol, Peet's Coffee, Playtex, Purina, Red Bull, Starbucks, Vitamin Water -- and Trojan condoms.
Looking at the bigger picture, it's clear that both the Dash Buttons and the DRS (and even Amazon's smart speaker system Echo) are part of Amazon's master plan to tie e-commerce with smart home technology and the Internet of Things.