Amazon Flow Makes It Easier to Picture Products Before Buying

One of the last big advantages left to the brick-and-mortar marketing concept is its ability to offer hands-on consideration of products available. This hands-on capability can sometimes even work against the brick-and-mortar in a practice known as “showrooming,” by which the potential buyers look at goods in a store, but turn to the Internet to get a better price. Amazon, meanwhile, is working to pull that advantage out from under brick-and-mortar with a new feature called Flow.

Flow, a part of the Amazon mobile app for iPhone—no word as yet on when it will arrive on the Android version, if at all--actually offers similar features to an earlier search tool on said app known as Snap It, which worked for simple things like books, movies and video games, using the cover art along with a “Use Photo” button in the app to take a picture of the item in question. With Flow, however, a wide variety of products are included in the overall scope of operations, allowing users to essentially take household items and find same just by showing said items to the iPhone's camera. One user reported that the system was so responsive, when it spotted an old issue of Time magazine, the system produced an offer to buy that very same issue from a used magazine vendor.

The system, however, is not foolproof. Image recognition can only go so far, particularly when dealing with those objects that look similar to other objects. For instance, a Macbook Pro might be mistaken for a Macbook Air, or a Scotch tape dispenser could be mistaken for a roll of Scotch tape. Since the Flow system puts something of a focus on logos, it means that the specifics can be a bit wrong sometimes, but still often within the ballpark. Better yet, once a product is identified, similar products are often listed, allowing users to pick various colors or styles of a single product. That's a bit of a downside for Amazon—no one-click buying option here—but the ability to add such things to a cart will likely prove just as welcome.

While such a program would actually be particularly welcome for showroomers—just point the camera at the device in question and get prices—it actually manages to do even worse; it will in some cases keep people out of the showroom altogether. Imagine this working from, say, a Sunday circular. It's not clear whether the Flow function can work from a photo itself, but if it can, it may well turn a potential showroom's advertising into a kind of showroom itself. Basically, it makes a process that was already easy—shopping on Amazon—into a practice that's even easier. Make a practice easier, and it increases the number of people who are likely to use the service, driving more users into Amazon's waiting embrace.

It's not perfect as yet, but with a little bit of workaround and a few mental gymnastics, the Flow feature could make an already impressive experience all the better for it. That's the kind of thing that should improve Amazon shareholders' outlook, and make brick-and-mortar all the more nervous.