If you wanted them or not, there are more Amazon Dash buttons available

Ever since Amazon announced its Dash buttons last year, those little plastic Buy-Me-buttons you're supposed to stick around your house and push to instantly re-order goods, the company has been releasing a steady stream of partner announcements. From garbage bags to dog food, coffee to condoms, and a whole bunch of stuff in between — you can order it with a Dash Button.

Amazon is continuing to push the service, adding 50 new brands today to its Dash buttons today. These include Nerf, Play-Doh, Fiji Water, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish crackers and Milano cookies, Clif Bar, Herbert's Lemonade, Trident, and many more. Basically, if you are planning a day at the beach, and are lucky enough to also be planning a day at the beach three months from now when you run out of all of the above, you can just press a Dash button to reorder. The button itself costs $4.99 upfront, but Amazon will credit that amount to your account.

However, it's still unclear exactly how successful the Dash button initiative has been over the past year. Today's partner announcements bring Amazon's Dash button total to 150 different brands. The company has said that order frequency has doubled over the past few months, and that in that same amount of time, total Dash Button orders went up 70 percent. But we still don't know exactly how many orders have been made with Dash buttons, only that Amazon says the numbers are going up. As The Wall Street Journal points out in an earlier article about the Dash buttons, one retail intelligence firm estimates that fewer than fifty percent of people who have purchased buttons have actually used them.

Personally, I haven't re-used my Dash buttons very often since I first tried them — I think I've reordered trash bags and baby wipes once each. Still, between Amazon's voice-controlled assistant Alexa and the interface-free Dash buttons, it's clear Amazon still firmly believes in the reality of what some might see as an e-commerce fever dream; maybe someday we'll all just shop by shouting commands at a personified AI or by pushing tiny plastic buy dongles that have infested every corner of our homes.