alt Hacker NewsI think you've identified the core reason people won't use these tools to make blind purchases, at least those who aren't {m,b}illionaires.
A noteworthy proof of this is the failure of Amazon Dash buttons [1] that blindly ordered your consumables for you. Amazon gave away these devices essentially for free ($5 off with your first order, or some such offer), and people still didn't seem to have been comfortable to use it.
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The buttons had a "dedupe" setting to allow only a single pending item until said item was delivered fwiw.
I really liked the dash buttons for two reasons:
1. It made ordering something you regularly and only buy online anyway easy for an entire household, like for my use case, hookah coals roughly every month.
2. You could place the button next to where you store said consumable and most folks would prefer using it over asking for a link or reminding someone else to re-order.
I do think it was a mistake to launch with an initial limited set of branded buttons for common household goods most people pickup at the store anyway (like detergent) instead of a generic button for my point 1's usecase but thats just plain-old BigTech thinking.
As with smartphone IAPs, this falls apart as soon as it encounters small children who like to press buttons.
I was always surprised and disappointed that Amazon didn’t have some customer-friendly pricing policy with these. For example, that your next Dash order for its associated product would cost $X (and maybe an indication alongside the delivered product of what the next one would cost). That or a small LCD to show the current price. Instead, it just struck me as a “please charge me any number you like” button, and I don’t have anything like enough trust in Amazon (or price insensitivity) to push one of those.
It'd certainly be possible to make this work well enough for a lot of us.
Yes, you'd need to sort out pricing. I'm unusually price insensitive, but too many sellers play stupid games and win stupid prizes (me shopping around instead of blindly buying from them every time) by changing unit prices too much too often (e.g. my sons preferred shower gel litre price regularly rotates between prices that adds up to a factor of 3 difference, with any given size container at any given time potentially being a massive rip-off). You could fix that by letting users configure price bands and make it pick from a set of products based on price parameters or give an error. Or only include products where the sellers agree to not play stupid games.
But now your UI is massively complicated and you have error scenarios you didn't have before.
Even then, though, the bigger problem is that there just aren't enough product categories where we frequently order the same thing often enough separately from e.g. the weekly grocery run, to be worth it.
In my household I think it basically boils down to shower gels - because I have a teenage son - toilet rolls, dishwasher tablets and washing machine tabs.
That's not nothing, but it's not going to make me order materially more from Amazon to be able to press a button to reorder vs. pull out my phone, press "orders" in the Amazon app, and find the last order I made and reorder the product.
And I say this as someone who did order a couple of Dash buttons when they came out and promptly forgot to even use them (and I don't even remember why).
It's just such a very minor convenience that to work it'd need to have absolutely zero friction, and even then the revenue it'd bring would likely be totally marginal.