Via Joe Wikert’s blog I learned about Amazon’s new TextBuyIt service. Basically, in the US, you can buy stuff from Amazon by sending them a text message from your phone. They search for what you texted and send you back results, then you send another text to choose which item to buy, and finally Amazon gives you a call to confirm the purchase.

The idea seems to be that when you’re in a regular store you can check if Amazon has an item that you want at a cheaper price. It might be handy but the whole process seems a bit clumsy, especially compared to just walking to the checkout counter and buying something. However, in Japan my cellphone has a barcode reader (via the phone’s camera). It only works for special QR codes but I don’t see why it couldn’t work for regular barcodes as well. This could streamline the process quite a lot — just scan the barcode with your phone, enter a PIN number for security, and the ordering from Amazon could possibly be done without the extra two steps in Amazon’s process.

Obviously, retailers wouldn’t like this very much. They could retaliate by deploying cellphone jammers, but that would annoy their customers. More likely, they could drop barcodes and switch to encrypted RFID tags that can only be read by the store’s scanners.

Actually I’m not exactly sure how successful phone-based substitution of online for offline shopping would be. Given that people are already in a store, they’ve already incurred the cost of getting to the store, so that cost is sunk and irrelevant to their decision about whether to buy from the store or buy from Amazon. This nullifies part of the advantage of online shopping (saving you the cost of going to a store). Also given that you are at a store, the store offers truly instant gratification, whereas Amazon involves a delay of at least a day, or more if you don’t want to pay expensive shipping fees. Thus there are some factors stacked in the store’s favour, and Amazon would have to offer a low enough price to offset those. The key question is whether the economics of online versus offline retailing allow it to do that — is Amazon’s technology sufficiently efficient relative to a retail store that it can offer a low enough price that gets consumers who are already in a store to buy from it? It will be interesting to see how this plays out.