MyPunchblog

I’ve been a big fan of Amazon ever since I’ve discovered their “Prime” shipping option. For $99 a year, Prime shipping offers you and four of your family members/friends the ability to order anything from Amazon and get free 2 day shipping. I’ve been a Prime member for two years now, and I’ve significantly increased my usage of Amazon as a result (full disclosure: after discovering Prime I bought a few shares of Amazon and have watched the stock double in this time period –woohoo!).

This morning, I noticed that Amazon has announced a new service called TextBuyit. After trying it out this morning, I’ve realized that this will literally change the way I shop forever.

Ever since I became an Amazon Prime member, I’d often jot down the name of the book or gift that I saw in a store, come back home and order it online. For the holiday season, this was very useful– since I have the physical addresses of friends and family already pre-loaded into Amazon and shipping is free we sent a few gifts along directly from Amazon. Easy and simple.

With TextBuyit, Amazon has taken it one step further. Now, while I’m in the store, I can text message Amazon the basic details of the item, and Amazon will text me back with the price. To purchase the item, I can simply text message back “1″ to Amazon. Pretty cool. Here’s a graphic that explains it all:

This new service will change the way I shop forever. Everytime I’m close to buying something in a store, I’ll check to see the Amazon price. With free shipping on Amazon, it will be a no-brainer to order from Amazon. I can literally be in the aisle of the book store (or electronics store) and decide to purchase on Amazon instead. Wow.

I believe that this will have huge implications for brick and mortar stores in the long-run. Amazon has just inserted their storefront into virtually every book, electronic, and grocery store in America. Amazon has just changed the way I’ll shop forever — a truly disruptive technology.

Damn, this web thing is pretty cool.

This entry was posted on April 2, 2008 at 10:05 am and is filed under Features and Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.