By Gary Schwartz

After talking about impulse purchases for more than 10 years, my Dash button arrived to be duly attached to my washing machine for timely one-click checkout.

In measuring clicks to commerce, Amazon’s application experience is four pre-clicks to set up the patented one-click purchase: Find phone, open app, search product and select product. The Dash is truly one click. Shopper marketing in the home.

Trojans to Huggies
There are more than 100 Dash buttons for the home. In addition to household (Tide), there is beverage (Red Bull), personal care (Gillette), beauty (L’Oreal), pet (Purina) and baby (Huggies). Click in context and the order goes directly via the home Wi-Fi to debit your wallet and through a prime account to your door within 24 hours.

From emergency Trojan Dash button orders to the inevitable bulk purchases of Huggies via the Huggies Dash button, impulse shopping is changing the way we interact with brands in the home.

Data decisions
Amazon’s DRS – or Dash Replenishment Service – is a data play that attempts to anticipate the user’s click. If you compare the button to DRS alone, one requires the consumer to proactively engage to order, the other aspires to anticipate her needs.

If successful, DRS could become the be button-less commerce sprite in the home.

Whirlpool and Brita machines plan to have self replenishment intelligence built into the system logic. Like a printer/cartridge economy where the ink is the revenue subscription multiple, Brother is building a printer can self-order ink, driving frictionless basket.

Where Cisco, IBM and other leviathans are preaching Internet of Things but really delivering cost effective M2M, Amazon Dash and DRS are the closest to a human-in-the-middle approach to retail IoT.

Hointer
Hointer, a new-age software solution for retail, similarly provides a customer need-centric experience. Scan items and have them appear in a fitting room with intelligence accessorizing to drive impulse and convenient purchase.

Hointer CEO Dr. Nadia Shouraboura cut her teeth as former head of supply chain and fulfillment technologies for Amazon.com.

According to Dr. Shouraboura, Hointer’s solution results in six times the volume of trial in the change room and this in turn results in 80 percent more sales. The click-to-sale ratio is increased. Shopkeepers are doing less mess management and more recommendation sales.

These companies are leading the way in IoT design thinking. By innovating with IoT product strategies, narrow casting choice and optimizing the checkout, these companies can successfully drive basket and loyalty.

Gary Schwartz is Toronto-based chair emeritus of MEF and IAB, and director of LBMA. Reach him at [email protected].