Amazon Lets US Shoppers Text Its Alexa Agent to Find and Buy Products

The company said on Friday that a small group of US customers had been invited to try the feature and that it plans to open it to millions more over the coming weeks. Invited customers accept the terms, link a phone number and get a new contact in their phone called "Alexa Shopping". Others can sign up on Amazon's landing page to be told when more invitations go out.

The launch puts Amazon's own agent into the channel where rival shopping assistants have been competing for users, and it comes with advertising attached. Sponsored Products ads appear among the options the agent texts back while a customer is browsing, though purchases the agent completes on its own remain free of ads, Digiday reported. Amazon is not yet charging advertisers for those placements, according to Digiday.

Amazon said the agent can take a list of errands, set up weekly grocery orders, pull recipe ingredients from a photo and reorder past purchases with the customer's approval. Users can send a picture of an item or an outfit to find similar products, ask for alerts when prices fall, see up to a year of price history and have the agent watch for new releases on Amazon and elsewhere on the web. Through Amazon's Shop Direct programme, it can also surface products from other stores.

The company said the agent learns preferences over time, such as dietary restrictions or fitness goals, and that a conversation started by text can continue in the Amazon Shopping app, on Amazon.com or on Alexa-enabled devices. Order updates, delivery notifications and deals will also appear in the same text thread over time.

"Your personal shopping agent is just a text away," said Rajiv Mehta, Amazon's vice president of conversational shopping. Amazon said more than 400 million customers have used Alexa for Shopping in the past 12 months, and that use of its agentic features has grown more than eightfold since the start of the year.

The feature follows Amazon's decision in September to block Meta's Muse agent from querying its site. Amazon said at the time that Muse accessed its platform without notice and failed to identify itself, according to Digiday. Text-based agents such as Muse and Instinct have become a popular way to shop with AI, and retailers are increasingly building their own rather than relying on outside agents. Last month DoorDash said third-party agents had placed only hundreds of orders in total on its platform, and that it would focus on its own text-based agent, launched in September, TechCrunch reported.

Ad measurement is the open question for brands. Jonathan D'Sousa-Rauto, an independent ad tech consultant, told Digiday that "any new ad placement is generally seen as an interesting test", but said how Amazon defines an impression in a text conversation, and how it reports results, will decide whether the ads deliver for advertisers. Amazon has not said when it will start charging for them.