Quantity discounts are available if you get 3,6 or 12 Dots.
Amazon Currently Offers Steep Quantity Purchase Discounts for their Newest Smart Home Device the Echo Dot
My Echo Was A Mother’s Day Present
I was really excited when my family gave me the Amazon Echo for Mother’s Day! Setting it up was a breeze and we had a lot of fun exploring all the things Alexa could do to make our lives easier. But there was one big disappointment which I’m still hoping Amazon has prioritized to fix…Alexa can’t conduct web searches for you! As the reality of that really sunk in (because Amazon seems to go out of their way to not make that point clear)…our use of Alexa took a dramatic decline.
So you might be wondering why I’m so excited about Amazon’s newest Dot and the quantity discount pricing that currently prevails. My answer is because there are a lot of things that Alexa can do that are really helpful right now…but those things aren’t always needed in our study, which is where we’ve located our Echo device. I’m extremely ‘time challenged.’ Despite my trying really hard I have a tendency to be late. But I don’t want to be…I don’t like the message that sends people. So I think that placing Dot in our bedroom would help me to be on time.
Having a Dot upstairs could help me to find out what to wear using Alexa’s great weather reporting feature, while I do things like make the bed. I could also use Alexa as an alarm clock to wake me up! And I could even use the timer function to give me ‘15 minute warnings‘ as I’m getting ready to leave for an appointment or meeting. If I’m doing some work in our room, like right now I’m sorting through drawers and closets to find articles of clothing to donate…so I can make room for some new purchases (who knew Costco has some great clothing finds online!)…I can listen to news briefings. I could even listen to free Amazon Prime music, although I’ve read that Dot’s onboard speaker isn’t great for that. But the Bluetooth connectivity is supposed to be great and there’s an audio jack too.
Amazon’s 3 Main Products in The Smart Home Lineup
The 3 main smart home product’s Amazon offers are:
- Echo – the most expensive but most robust of the 3 devices is $179.99. It’s an internet connected black tower or tube with glowing blue lights that wakes up to serve you when you say Alexa.
- Tap – Amazon’s Tap ($129.99) is their answer for people who want a truly mobile device, because it can operate completely on battery power. For home use it’s less convenient though because you need to press a button to get Alexa’s attention…so that the batteries don’t burn out rapidly. It’s also a tower/tube shape that’s a few inches shorter than the Echo.
- Dot – the Dot is a tiny version of the Echo…but instead of looking like a tower or tube, it looks more like….well, a Dot! It does everything Echo does for less ($50 versus $179.99.)
Below is a comparison showing each devices’ specs and features. If you want to learn more about specific Alexa supported features for each device you can go here.
Music is one thing that most people use Alexa for. If you love music having an Alexa enabled device…or set of devices is a fabulous way to listen to streaming music throughout your home if you don’t have a great sound system installed. The Echo’s speaker is really pretty good! From what I’ve read, the Dot’s is less than stellar…which explains the $129 price difference. Most people who get the Dot for music already have Bluetooth or wired speakers that they connect to their Dot.
Recently, I became an Amazon Associate which means that I can earn very small commissions on products I write about and recommend. I take this responsibility very seriously and so wanted to disclose that if you purchase one of these products using my links, I’d receive a small commission which has no impact upon the price you pay. It’s taken out of Amazon’s portion of the profits and probably one of their main sources of marketing.
Amazon Echo Echo is Amazon’s top of the line smart home device
Amazon Tap Amazon’s Tap can be used anywhere because it’s battery powered.
Amazon Dot The 2nd Generation Dot is Amazon’s moust economical device at $50 (or less if purchased in quauntities of 3.)
My Overall Take on Alexa
The built-in features that I’ve described above are all really great and function so effortlessly that anyone could get them going quite readily. The main method to do this is via installing an Alexa app on a mobile device. There’s a large and rapidly growing set of additional features, functions and utilities available through add on apps which are called Skills. The Skills library can also be accessed through the Alexa mobile app or the Skills can be enabled right on the Echo, Dot or Tap too. Amazon has taken great pains to make this hardware extraordinarily good. And I’m confident that Amazon knows that they’ll only be able to hold onto the upper hand edge that they currently enjoy in this market by enabling Alexa with the ability to conduct basic web searches.
A Little More About Web Searches
There are plenty of YouTube videos demonstrating Alexa’s skills, which appear to include searching for information online. But what I learned through trial and error was that many of those demonstrations rely upon data and knowledge that has been preprogrammed into Alexa. As new firmware updates come out this aspect is improved upon…but it’s unrealistic to think that programmers can anticipate every question a person might want to search for online and program answers to that. It’s really perplexing to me why Amazon chose this route versus the more traditional avenues used by Apple’s ‘Hey Siri‘ and Google Now’s ‘OK Google‘ hands-free web searching engines. I guess only time will tell.
The Price to Productivity Ratio
For me, the Alexa engine, even without the missing web search feature still offers enough bang for the buck to make it worthwhile. Especially because the newer Dot priced at $50, costs even less than its predecessor, yet it offers all the same great features, better hardware performance and most importantly all of the features that the much higher priced Echo ($179.99) does.
Add into that the quantity discounts available and it’s a no brainer for me to get at least a 3 pack of the Dots so I can have one and give each of my kids one too. Below are the quantity discounts currently available. In all of these cases you need to add a discount code such as DOT#PACK where the #=the quantity you’re purchasing, during the checkout process at Amazon.
Quantity Discounts Available for Buying Echo Dot
Here’s a link explaining more about the quantity purchasing discount deal. Amazon doesn’t give a time frame for how long this option will be available but I suspect it will end as they deplete their inventory. One reason that I don’t own the Dot yet is because I ran across a great deal for it (the gen 1 version) a few months back, which I learned about one day and decided to take advantage of it the next. Sadly, the next day that deal was no longer available. In retrospect, because gen 2 just came out this was actually a blessing in disguise!
Below Are the Codes for The Quantity Deals Available
DOT3PACK Buy 3 save $20
DOT6PACK Buy 6 get one free
DOT12PACK Buy 12 get 2 free
How to Use Amazon’s Quantity Discount Codes
- First go to the product page for Dot and enter 3 (6 or 12) in the Quantity field before you click on add to cart. Then go to your shopping cart. If you forgot to update the Quantity you can do that in the shopping cart too.
- Next copy and paste the appropriate code (example DOT3PACK) right above the shopping cart…into a small box that appears under Payment Method…then click on Apply.
- You should notice that the price in your order summary has changed to reflect the discount.
- Then click on Place Your Order.
Amazon’s Newest Thanksgiving Day Sale is Called Black Friday Week
Here’s a link to more information about this 8 day event.
Why It’s Important to Buy This Today (or really soon at least!)
Everyone knows I’m a huge fan of Amazon Prime and get myself all worked up over their special events like Prime Days. Well, Prime Day is only once a year…but sales on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, also one day only, are almost as good at Amazon as their own annual event is. So when I went to Amazon today to add the audio upgrade to a Kindle book I’m reading currently and discovered that this year Amazon’s is combining those 2 days into a weeklong celebratory shopping event I got completely distracted and began reading all about that instead. Here’s what I learned. In a nutshell…this new event BEGAN TODAY! More important, there are deals that are only available via Alexa…meaning that there are special deals anyone who uses an Alexa enabled device can access…that the rest of the world can’t. But if you don’t have the Echo, Dot or Tap just yet…that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of these special offers.
That’s because any Alexa enabled device can access these deals. In addition to the devices I’ve already discussed, this includes any Amazon Fire TV, Kindle or Amazon Fire Tablet too. Amazon has even begun to offer this capability to non-Amazon devices, although I’ve not yet heard anything about Android or Apple devices. But I discovered this news reading the fine print in the screenshot below. If you want to see all the daily deals you can do so using this link. But you’ll only be able to order products using an Alexa, voice enabled device.
Conclusion
Some of these special deals are available only via Alexa voice search. That combined with the new week long shopping event that Amazon is hosting and which began today, is why for me, there’s no time to waste in placing my quantity order for the Echo Dot…it’s just a matter of deciding how many I would like to place around our home right now. I truly believe anyone currently familiar with Amazon’s Echo technology will find the quantity pricing a great surprise. Because it’s something I discovered so randomly and it doesn’t seem to be well publicized I decided to share this with my readers too…even though this isn’t my typical kind of post.
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Comments
Please feel free to leave me any comments…especially if you’ve run across other great Amazon Deals too!
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