The undisputed leader and world’s biggest online retail marketplace (of B2C segment) has added another feather to its hat. Amazon announced its all new, feature rich app especially designed for Android smartphones. With Android phones capturing the biggest share of the smart-phone market, this move was reasonably foreseeable.
An Android smart-phone user can choose to take the traditional route and login to the site Amazon.com on the web browser and navigate through the full website on the mobile screens. Alternatively, they can download this free Android Amazon app. Just like the full site, the app also allows you to buy goods, check out recommended products, and even create wish lists. I was surprised to figure that one can simply scan real world items (like books, apparels etc.) using the device’ camera and search them over the marketplace without manually searching the items.
Signing up is very easy and convenient. One can sign into the app using their existing Amazon account credentials or create a new account from scratch. I signed in with my current Amazon account and was delighted to see the recommendations and other highlighted products in a similar manner to what you see in Amazon.com.
Another cool thing I noticed was that for the users who already have the standalone Amazon Music with Prime Music installed on their devices, the app offered other fun features (Amazon Music with Amazon Prime immediately began downloading the tracks of the album I purchased).
Navigation and scanning was so close to perfect. The app offers multiple means to look for products. These products can be browsed by department, can be viewed in the items carousels displayed as the recommended products, they can also be manually hunted by entering the product term into the search box, and even search the items through the product barcode. For the last option, one needs to tap and activate the bar code reader, hold the smartphone/tablet in landscape mode and appropriately positioning the product’s barcode to fit within in the orange viewfinder. To my satisfaction, it was able to recognize every barcode that I placed in front of the camera. Similar to the barcode scanner, another scanning feature called “Flow”, identified items even without a barcode. It immaculately pulled product pages based on the images.
In my opinion, both flow and barcode reader are amazing tools for comparing prices while shopping in the real world too. In my recent visits to various stores and supermarkets, I compared the product price online as against the in-store price. In most cases the items at Amazon were priced significantly lower as they were on the brick and mortar stores.
Once the product is finalized, it can be added to the wish list or directly into the check-out cart. There is also an elasticity to review purchased products, read reviews of the products, check out the items which are recently viewed, adjust account settings and perform other actions pretty much as they can be performed on the site.
This is surely a must app for all android users.
