Dive Brief:

• Amazon has launched Prime Surprise Sweets, which allows users to press an Amazon Dash button to automatically order a random assortment of small-batch candy made by “artisans from across the nation,” according to TechCrunch.
• Each Prime Surprise Sweets box costs $18 and ships for free in two days for Prime shipping members. Boxes can't be sent as gifts because each WiFi-connected Dash button is associated with the original buyer's address.
• The Prime Surprise Sweets program is currently invitation-only; Amazon customers can request an invitation be sent to them.

Dive Insight:

Prime Surprise Sweets seems like a service tailor-made for Valentine's Day, so it's a shame it can't be used to send a box of candy to someone else as a gift. Though that would not necessarily line up with the Dash button's aim to be a one-touch automatic ordering button, since such a feature would probably require the sender to somehow choose an address.

Also, if Amazon really wanted to make a pile of money off of Prime Surprise Sweets, the e-tailer should attach it to a same-day shipping offer, the better to lure those of us with random, powerful candy cravings that need attention as soon as possible.

Overall, this is another interesting application of the Dash program, which up to this point has been used more to enable quick or automatic ordering of frequently-repurchased items, and often integrated with appliances, such as dishwashers, that use those products.

Could Prime Surprise Sweets be an early indication of how Amazon might expand Dash to include other items? Even with Amazon's partnerships with major appliance makers to support the Dash program, the real viability and potential of the button has never been fully understood. Maybe Amazon can find certain products, common impulse buys among them, from independent producers that it can include in Dash to help its marketplace partners.

Perhaps one reason why the new program is invitation-only is that Amazon is itself trying to figure out just how far it can take Dash, and which products prove a good fit for automatic ordering. One way to find out is to put an offer out there, and see how many people press the button.