Auto-Replenishment in Action — Part 3 of 4
The Amazon Dash Smart Shelf
A Great Product with Poor Commercialization
Amazon has always been a pioneer when it comes to the shopping experience and today they are no different. Because of Amazon, things like free shipping on orders over X dollars, 2 day shipping (with Prime), and even same day delivery are expectations of any eCommerce website. Yes, I deliberately skipped 1 day/next day delivery because I have to attribute that one to the late, great Tony Hsieh and Zappos where it was subtly introduced as an unpublished standard to surprise and delight unsuspecting customers. Amazon even pioneered the instant delivery of digital content to ensure that whatever you might want to read/watch/listen to, it would be available right at that moment.
Amazon’s Dash Replenishment is just one more in a long line of innovations designed to improve the customer experience. In this case, it’s the removal of the shopping experience that is so delightful. Amazon is at the forefront of this revolutionary new purchase experience know as “auto-replenishment.”
As defined in a previous article:
Auto-replenishment is the process of automatically re-purchasing products at the moment a consumer needs a refill. An auto-replenishment system forecasts, or detects through real time monitoring, when the inventory of a household product is low and then automatically generates a refill order on behalf of the consumer to ensure that he/she does not run out.
The physical manifestation of Amazon’s auto-replenishment efforts is the new dash smart shelf.
The dash smart shelf is actually more of a smart scale or even a smart product base. The reason I shy away from the “shelf” designation is that a shelf is something for many items to be placed on. In this case, the scale is only designed for one item. If multiple items are placed on the “shelf” they need to all be the same exact product.
The idea here is that a consumer will place their laundry detergent on the dash smart shelf and it will instantly recognize the product (after setup). Based on the weight of the product, the smart shelf can calculate the amount remaining in the container. When the amount gets to a certain threshold, let’s say 10% remaining, Amazon will reorder the laundry detergent to have it arrive just before the customer uses up that last bit of their current supply.
Something like Tide laundry detergent is a very good use case for the dash smart shelf. Laundry detergent usually comes in a large container and sits the same spot all the time, right near the washing machine. Consumers don’t have a hard time putting it back where it goes and they are typically brand loyal. It is reasonable to believe that they will buy their preferred brand without question, even if a competitor is a few dollars less.
However, what about other products that might be good for the Amazon dash smart shelf? In a previous auto-replenishment article I described a Finish dish detergent smart tub that used a time of flight sensor in the lid. Would the dash smart shelf be a good replacement for Finish? Should RB stop working on the tub and just recommend Amazon’s product instead? In this case I would say, “No,” even though Amazon does market Finish as a compatible product with their device.
I believe that Amazon is thinking about the products themselves and not the actual use cases. If Amazon were to actually run some ethnographic studies on the products they are suggesting, they might pare down their recommendations. Let’s look at that Finish example vs. Tide. We’ve already described that Tide is sitting on a shelf above the washing machine or perhaps right on the machine itself. Slipping the scale underneath its larger package size is going to be pretty natural.
You can see that the shelf has a larger footprint than the Tide PODS, but it seems a reasonable accommodation.
Finish dish detergent, on the other hand, where does that live in the home? For most people, it lives under the kitchen sink along with most of the other household cleaners, the over mitts, some dish towels, rubber gloves, aluminum foil, etc. A current google search for “organize under the kitchen sink” currently has 10,500,000 results. The point here is that clearing a space and dedicating it to the dash smart shelf (7"x7" for the smallest version) would likely be a substantial challenge for most people. There is a high probability that other products will end up adding weight to the scale causing a false volume reading for the Finish dish detergent. By creating a smart container instead of a smart shelf, Finish manufacturer RB (disclosure: I led the innovation team that developed the smart tub for RB) has eliminated concerns about distorted readings. The smart tub is self contained and can be moved, placed on top of something else, and even have something placed on top of it without worry.
I won’t fault Amazon here. They developed an innovative platform (no pun intended) and then created a product of their own to enable it. The Finish smart tub is a custom solution for a single product line whereas the dash smart shelf has the potential to be a workable solution for many items, both in the home and in an office setting.
What I do want to point out is that Amazon needs to be careful about its efforts to bring this product to market. The ratings are poor at 3.6 out of 5 (Jan. 23, 2021) with only 54% 5 star reviews. Customers are complaining that Amazon is recommending the dash smart shelf as an add-on to orders which end up being incompatible with the device. Here’s an example of a recent review that both highlights the benefits of auto-replenishment over the more traditional subscribe and save model along with some problems in the Dash Replenishment roll out:
The last time I ordered wood pellets for my smoker I noted that I could add this item as an accessory to automatically reorder them when I ran low. This is a great idea, since my regular “Subscribe and Save” shipments leave me running out of pellets in the summer, overflowing with them in the winter, and every couple months I had to set it up again because sellers drop out of the program or increase the price a thousand fold.
I just tried to set it up and guess what? The selection is extremely limited. Not only is the product for which I ordered this as an accessory ineligible, but searching for it merely shows several pages of results mostly for cat litter. I do not have any desire to smoke a rack of ribs with cat litter, so that greatly limits the usefulness of this item.
Amazon needs to have these devices automatically configured for the product you ordered them with, and they need to make them work with any product on Amazon. If I want to stack laptops on the scale and reorder them five at a time when I get low, then let me. Just warn me there’s no discount if the seller doesn’t participate in Subscribe and Save.
It’s a great review that gives Amazon some real direction. This is what I was referring to earlier when I suggested that Amazon is not considering the actual experience of the customer with the products that it is recommending. In my previous article about problems with auto-replenishment, I mentioned a Culligan water filter for a shower head that makes sense for auto-replenishment even though the purchase cycle is very long. While researching the article, I went to Amazon’s product details page just to make sure I was referencing everything correctly.
You can see on the lower right of the product details snapshot, Amazon is recommending the Dash Smart Shelf as an accessory to the shower filter replacement cartridge. Why? There is no use case in which the smart shelf makes sense here. I only need one filter cartridge and that one is actually in the shower head. For the smart shelf to work, I would need to buy an additional filter cartridge and place it on the scale in a cabinet where it would sit for 3–6 months taking up valuable space. This is not a realistic use case but because Amazon seems to be indiscriminately trying to push the dash smart shelf, customers like the one was quoted above are ending up very frustrated.
For customers genuinely interested in the product, the Amazon dash smart shelf review section is also littered with entirely satirical reviews that poke fun at the product. The desire to stack cash on the scale only to have Amazon replenish it was seen multiple times. I’m not sure how ethical it would be for Amazon to cull some of these reviews that are clearly not intended to inform a purchase, but the jokes are definitely not helping their sales.
Amazon does have a section dedicated to products that will work with the dash smart shelf, but again, I question their judgement in terms of selecting and highlighting products that don’t work in the real world. When reviewing Amazon’s most popular smart shelf compatible products, the #1 listing is for ACT children’s mouthwash. Again, how many containers of children’s mouthwash would parents need to keep on hand? The smallest version of the dash smart shelf is 7" x 7". The size of the ACT mouthwash is 3.36" x 2.06".
For the dash smart shelf to make any sense at all in with the ACT Children’s Mouthwash, there would need to be one in the bathroom on/under the sink or in the medicine cabinet and then in the linen closet there would need to be between 4–6 bottles on the shelf. This the the top product being recommended to consumers. It is not a good choice to pair with the device.
I suspect a complete failure of the dash smart shelf product unless Amazon puts significant effort into making quality recommendations to customers. It’s better to start with 5 extremely relevant products that make perfect sense than it is to start with 5,000 mediocre or outright poor choices.
I want to be very clear that I think the Dash Smart Shelf, if paired correctly, is a very innovative and useful product. Work simply needs to be done on the commercialization side which can only be described as an afterthought.
Additionally, in my next article on this topic I will propose an enhancement to the dash smart shelf that would likely make it far more practical for everyday use across a larger portfolio of common household products, including the children’s mouthwash.
Disclosure: Any links to Amazon carry an affiliate code from which I earn a commission in the event that a purchase is made.
