There’s a new entrant to the market aiming to compete with Amazon Dash Buttons. Kwik enables retailers to offer branded buttons which once programmed can place repeat orders for your favourite products with a single click.
Unlike Amazon Dash, Kwik is an open system which allows any retailer to connect buttons to their back end systems. This means the consumer doesn’t have to order from Amazon, they have have a direct order button for any of their favourite retailers.
The main idea is that consumers are lazy and it’s much easier to press a button than use an app on your mobile or fire up a tablet or computer to place an order. It all sounds great in theory, but in reality how many buttons will you want sprinkled around your home? A button for pizza delivery, pet food, nappies, coffee, taxi, washing powder, shower gel… the list is endless.
Personally I think that the market for this type of one click ordering is still in it’s infancy and what we’ll see in the future is devices with programmable buttons built in. In fact Amazon are already pursuing partnerships with companies like Whirlpool and Brita for built in buttons which can automatically anticipate when you need new supplies based on usage and reorder automatically.
The way technology works however isn’t to get the end result on day one. Just look at smart phones and how they’ve evolved over the past decade. Companies like Kwik are essential to quick start the technology and get consumers using buttons even if it’s just a single button for reordering just one product.
Overtime it’s almost certain that Kwik will do the same as Amazon and look for partners to build their technology into devices. In many ways they’re even more interesting than Amazon Dash as they’re retailer agnostic and rather than your goods arriving from Amazon they could come from your normal supermarket or independent retailer.
Single click order buttons could also be ideal for business use, imagine a stable yard being able to click a button to order hay or feed, a button to order janitorial supplies for just about any business with a bathroom, the possibilities are endless. Perhaps one day when you take your car for a service the onboard computer will notify the garage in advance that it needs new suspension bushes plus the oils and filters for a new service, the garage will book a timeslot for you and the parts will be delivered ready from the auto-factor of their choice.
Kwik is a company to watch as single click order buttons built into devices will be here within just a few short years.
