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Is the Amazon Fire phone the ultimate showrooming machine?

Amazon's first smartphone combines visual product recognition with one-click shopping from the online giant's inventory. Should other retailers be scared?

September 16, 2014 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have been the primary focus of the smartphone world since their recent announcement. Lost in the shuffle of pageviews was the news that Amazon was dropping prices on its Fire Phone, as low as $0.99 with a 2-year contract.

The Fire phone is significant for one major feature that the iPhone will never have: It's an Amazon device, so it is directly wired in to the Amazon inventory and content garden. Combine that with a new visual recognition feature called Firefly, and you have what might be considered the ultimate showrooming device.

One of the several buttons on the left side of the phone launches the camera if you press it; hold it down and Firefly launches. Once it's ready — a swirling field of white dots superimposed on the viewfinder lets you know — point it at any item and it will attempt to identify it. Once it does, you can buy it from Amazon with a single click.

We wanted to see just how accurate the Fire phone is, so we took it to a variety of retail establishments and attempted to showroom with it. (Amazon provided us a unit for review purposes.)

Media

Ostensibly, this is the category you'd expect the Fire phone to fare the best in, and you'd be right to think that.  

The fact that Firefly is entirely image-driven is both its strength and its weakness: All of the three items in the first row were recognized instantly and on the first try, as their packaging is relatively clean, with only the first one having any sort of sticker or label on it. When faced with the Sherlock DVD, however, it couldn't get past the barcodes, despite multiple tries, and was never able to find a match. The other two both required several tries, but eventually it found them both — in the case of the last one, at a considerably lower price.

One other notable point: the phone recognized that that particular season of Breaking Bad is available to view at no charge if you're a Prime subscriber, and it offered to take me there to watch it immediately, no purchase of any kind necessary.

Everything else

Here's where the Fire phone had a harder time, once taken outside the realm of books, movies and games.

Out of this batch of six, the Fire only yielded a better deal on two of them; it either didn't recognize three of them or took us to a different item, and in the case of the diapers, Amazon's price is higher for the same item.

The Doctor Who totebag is another example of the Fire phone's visual recognition working against it: That particular design is on dozens of different products; Firefly thought this was a cell phone case. It thought the TV was a ceiling-mounted security system, and it thought the knives were cutting boards (in both cases, the boxes for each product had similar layouts and color schemes).

Conclusions and takeaways

So, is this the "ultimate showrooming machine"? For books, movies and other media, it certainly seems to be. It's not so impressive when it comes to the types of things that heavy Prime users buy the most of (consumables, large durable products), but even so, it's an incredibly easy way for those heavy users to make their shopping lists in-store, immediately ordering the things it does find and find cheaper. (And of course, we are entirely leaving aside the fact that reviews of the phone in general have been lackluster.)

I showed the process to Doug Adams, owner of Comic Book World, the store at which the first item was snapped. I asked him, what do you say to someone who comes in and tells you they can get this book for half the price at Amazon?

"I tell them to get it from Amazon," he said. "If all they care about is price, then they'll be happier buying from them."

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