Brick-and-mortar retailers are already accustomed to being challenged by Amazon.com in cyberspace. Now they may find themselves squaring off against the online retail giant within those same brick walls—and in fact anywhere shoppers can get a few bars on their mobile phones.
Amazon.com has launched “Amazon TextBuyIt,” a mobile-commerce platform that lets consumers buy from the Web merchant via text messaging. Users can text the name, search term, Universal Product Code (UPC) or ISBN number to “AMAZON” (262966). Within seconds, Amazon says, it will reply with the corresponding products and their prices through Amazon.com.
Customers can reply to this text by sending the unique digit code next to the exact item they want. In return, Amazon will send out a brief phone call relaying the order details and asking shoppers to confirm or cancel the purchase.
First-time customers using TextBuyIt will be asked for the e-mail address and shipping ZIP code already attached to their existing Amazon.com account. Amazon will then use that account’s default settings for payment, shipping address and ship speed. That should reduce the difficulty and drudgery of inputting information on mobile handsets.
“Any Amazon.com customer can now use any mobile device to shop and buy from Amazon.com at any time, anywhere they are,” said Howard Gefen, director of Amazon mobile payments, in a statement. “With TextBuyIt, if you’re walking out of a concert and want to buy a CD from the artist you just saw, or if you’re at dinner and a friend tells you about a great book you should read, all you have to do is get out your mobile device, send a text message to Amazon, reply to the response, confirm your order, and your item will be on its way.”
The concert and dinner examples aside, text-shopping from Amazon might have more impact when customers are actually in stores and searching for products. In those situations, keying in a UPC code might become a popular way to do price comparison shopping or read customer product reviews from within a retailer’s outlet.
Amazon has already made forays into m-commerce with two WAP sites for mobile users launched last fall: one for standard browsers and one tailored for iPhone users. Both mobile sites incorporate registered users’ shipping preferences, allow the creation of wish lists, and offer recommendations based on past purchases. Amazon claims that customers have used those two mobile sites to buy everything from books and music to HDTV sets and $30,000 watches.
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