Amazon gave a select group of US customers early access on Friday to shop over text using its Alexa for Shopping agent. The feature lets you search for items, compare options, and place orders right inside a text thread. This lands right before the holiday shopping rush, pushing Amazon deeper into the race for AI-driven shopping.
How the text agent works
If you have access, you’ll get a text message from a contact called “Alexa Shopping.” Once it’s set up, you can just text it like a regular friend. Amazon gave a few examples: you can start your weekly grocery run, reorder detergent you bought a month ago, or send a photo of an outfit to find similar clothes on the site.
The agent can add things to your cart and help to make purchases. It can also watch for price drops, and allow pricing history checks of up to a year. The shopping agent also manages shopping lists, tracks packages, and can even find items outside of Amazon using a feature called Shop Direct.
Amazon said the agent learns preferences over time. Tell it to show only organic or vegan options, and it remembers for later.
Amazon’s vice president of Conversational Shopping, Rajiv Mehta, stated that customers can now text Alexa with what they want to buy and let the assistant find it for them.
Invite-only now, millions later
Right now, Amazon is only opening the text feature to a small group of invited US customers. Millions more are expected to get access over the next few weeks. For customers that have not been invited, there is the option of a waitlist on their sign-up page.
You can start a shopping request in a text message and seamlessly pick it up later on the Amazon app, website, or an Alexa device—or the other way around. Yahoo Finance reported that Amazon hasn’t said how much money it expects to make from the new feature.
Shutting out rivals, building its own
The launch comes as Amazon tries to stop other shopping agents from using its platform. In September, it blocked Meta’s Muse shopping tool. The company claimed the tool had accessed Amazon without permission and stored customer login details, according to TechCrunch.
Amazon also took legal action against Perplexity’s Comet shopping agent and won a court order to block it in March. However, a US appeals court overturned the ban in August, and the case is still ongoing.
Other companies are racing for the exact same market. DoorDash recently shared that outside AI agents have only placed a few hundred orders on its app, so it’s focusing on its own text assistant instead. There are also other tools like Meta’s Muse and Google’s Universal Cart that are jumping in to let AI shop and buy items for customers.
By keeping customers on its own assistant, Amazon can maintain control over how they discover and buy products, rather than letting other AI tools take over that process.
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