When Amazon launched its oh-so-tempting Dash buttons it was a revolutionary idea that made reordering items that you buy regularly as simple as pushing the button. Normally you’d have to go to the website, find the item you wanted to reorder, and then click to place your order, but the Dash button cut out the middle man and made it so you never even had to actually go to Amazon in order to buy something. Now, the company is pretending nobody realized why Dash buttons were created in the first place by launching virtual Dash buttons which live on Amazon.com.
The idea here is that since so many people by so many different things from Amazon, the company can’t go and create a Dash button for literally every product on the site — and most people don’t want a dozen Dash buttons in their house anyway — so maybe you’ll use a virtual reordering button instead, right?
Amazon replaced online ordering with the physical Dash button, and now it’s supplementing that product with… online ordering, again. The whole point of the Dash button was that you didn’t have to go to Amazon to buy something, right? Here’s the steps to reorder something via the virtual buttons:
- Go to Amazon.com/open the Amazon app.
- Navigate to your Dash button list.
- Find the product you want to reorder on that list.
- Click the button.
And here are the steps to just order something from Amazon the normal way:
- Go to Amazon.com/open the Amazon app.
- Type your search for the product you want.
- Find the product you want to reorder in the results.
- Click the 1-click ordering button.
It’s exactly the same number of steps as before, only this time you’re clicking a virtual Dash button instead of just tapping the 1-click order button (which is essentially what a Dash button is anyway).
Maybe the company is doing this to make everyone more comfortable with the idea of the Dash button, thereby increasing the adoption rate of the physical versions, or maybe they’re going to shutter the Dash button entirely and want to let everyone down easy. Whatever the reason, it’s a silly, pointless addition.
