Amazon pulls the plug on Dash buttons
Dash buttons will be disconnected permanently at the end of the month
Amazon’s Dash buttons, which allowed customers to re-purchase household necessities at the touch of a button, are to be disconnected for good on 31 August.
The push-to-order buttons were released back in 2015, designed to make ordering household items a less strenuous task. Costing just $5 (£4), customers could push their Dash button(s) when they needed more of a specific household product, be that laundry detergent or Doritos. The product would then be delivered to their door.
However, the rise of smart home devices such as the Amazon Echo (and all of its multiple iterations) and the Google Home has made the physical buttons increasingly obsolete; shoppers can now bark orders to their countertop assistants to instigate a grocery shop.
Indeed, these smart home hubs provide far more diverse services than say, repeat-ordering a bag of Chili Heatwave Doritos, which looks like an almost comically confined task in 2019. We recently rounded up our pick of the best Echo accessories, which can turn your home assistant into anything from a thermostat to a home security camera.
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Hands-free, motion-sense technology has become increasingly du jour in recent months, with Google announcing Project Soli – gesture-based interaction and intelligent facial recognition – for the upcoming Pixel 4 in the past couple of weeks. It’s no surprise, then, that the old-school tangibility of Dash buttons is beginning to look and feel outmoded.
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In the light of developments like these, waning revenue generated via Dash buttons has prompted the e-tailer giant to pull the plug on the initiative.
Back in February, Amazon made the decision to discontinue Dash sales, foreshadowing the eventual winding down of the buttons. However, the company had promised to honour purchases made via the buttons as long as customers continued to use them. Amazon since appears to have done a U-turn on this promise, and will disconnect the pseudo-smart devices at the end of this month.
So if you’re the owner of a Dash button, now’s the time to make the most of it; Amazon will stop taking orders via the buttons on 31 August. Another device confined to the obsolete tech hall of fame. Sigh.
