Open for Commerce?

The Amazon Dash Button launched last week offers us a sneak peek into the future of commerce. Notwithstanding all the commentary around how this is a horror, or how it will make us more stupid, I think this is a good example of designing an experience from a shopper’s point of view. The button (not on a screen) is the perfect interface for a low involvement purchase that you routinely do. The promotion video sums it up nicely.

Don’t let running out ruin your rhythm,

The idea of “rhythm” equally applies to our digital pastimes too — social, content, gaming or anything else that keeps us in good humour.

So if you take a fancy for those quirky shades you found on a travel site while planning your upcoming beach holiday, you should be able to make that purchase right there, without ruining your rhythm. One button (this time on a screen) should save you the need to visit multiple e-commerce sites and fill out billing and shipping forms.

The shopper is the point of sale, not the store

The need for a store to be a destination is a limitation in the physical world. Digital storefronts need not be chained to a retailer’s site or app, they should be opened up for a new kind of commerce that is designed around the shopper, and their digital lifestyles. And this is exactly what we are building at Shopalyst.

Be it a button on your washing machine, or a printer that orders a cartridge refill on its own, or a video that lets you buy celebrity outfits straight out of your TV — these are all “apps” that consume our universal shopping APIs. As a catalyst for ubiquitous commerce, our platform makes any site or app perform commerce transactions natively by just adding a few lines of code. Our shopper centric model allows shoppers to own a cart that works universally across merchants, enabling purchases from multiple catalogs with a single checkout.

Shopping should be this easy!

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on April 7, 2015.