TechHive: Digital, meet physical: Amazon brings real-world purchases to Android apps

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thumbnail Digital, meet physical: Amazon brings real-world purchases to Android apps
Aug 27th 2013, 16:25, by Ian Paul

What if a calorie counting app made it easy to restock your fridge by selling the food listed in its extensive database? What if a football game let you purchase a special edition jersey for yourself, and then clothe your digital team in that same jersey?

That's the future Amazon is hoping to see with its new Mobile Associates API, which lets developers turn any app for Kindle Fire or the Amazon Appstore into a one-click shopping destination, even for real-world items.

Using the new API, app creators can hawk nearly anything Amazon offers, including physical products and digital downloads such as e-books. There are three ways developers can sell Amazon goods inside their apps: offer a single item for sale, showcase a category of goods, or bundle the purchase of physical goods with digital goods.

Amazon

That last category isn't so obvious so here's an example from Amazon's developer pages for a theoretical fitness tracking app. A developer could try and sell a jogger a heart rate monitor from Amazon inside the app. If the user bought it, the app could then unlock the ability to integrate with the Amazon-purchased monitor for free. In-app digital goods, in other words, could be used as inducements to buy Amazon's physical items.

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