Amazon lets customers text to buy

Amazon.com Inc.’s brick-and-mortar competitors have yet another reason to fear the Web: a new service that lets shoppers compare prices and buy things with a few quick taps on their cellphones.

Amazon TextBuyIt, which launched late Tuesday, lets people text the name of a product, its description or its UPC or ISBN to 262966 -- that’s “Amazon” on the keypad -- from anywhere their cellphones work, including inside stores.

Howard Gefen, director of Amazon mobile payments, would not directly answer whether the service was meant to extend Amazon’s reach by poaching customers browsing at bookstores or big-box electronics retailers.

“We think this is a great experience. We think they’ll use the product . . . wherever they happen to be,” he said.

Consumers price-shopping inside stores can check by cellphone to see whether Amazon stocks matching items. If so, the service returns two results at a time. Shoppers can immediately buy one of the selections by texting back the number “1” or “2,” or they can ask for more by texting the letter “m.”

New TextBuyIt customers will be prompted to enter the e-mail address associated with their existing Amazon account plus a shipping ZIP Code.