Amazon’s Alexa is now available on the company’s shopping app and website in the US, bringing a wide range of new capabilities. Customers can now visit the Amazon app or website to have Alexa support them with suggestions, guidance, and a couple of useful features while shopping.
Alexa can now track prices, bringing a native solution to a problem long required browser extensions like Keepa to solve. Now, you can simply ask Alexa to track a product’s price, and even place the order automatically once the product is at the target price.
Then, there’s more information to help you make better shopping decisions. You can ask Alexa for a product’s price history, allowing you to understand its price fluctuations and determine if the price is currently stagnant, an all-time low, or an all-time high.
Amazon says that Alexa can now help you compare categories and items, give recommendations, and reorder essentials. However, it’s important to note that several of these features were introduced with the Rufus shopping assistant in 2024. Rufus didn’t find success despite the occasional aggressive push from Amazon.
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Amazon is now replacing Rufus with Alexa for the shopping experience. Daniel Rausch, vice president of Alexa and Echo, told The Verge that Alexa is “more deeply integrated, more capable, and available everywhere.” Alexa will retain Rufus’ marketplace knowledge, but its arrival means a more effective LLM will be there to assist customers in browsing and exploring products.
Beyond the Amazon website and app, Echo devices can also play a key role in enhancing shopping experiences. Since Alexa can retain conversations, any information shared with Alexa can, in turn, allow the AI to tailor your shopping experiences based on the conversations.
Sharing an example in the announcement, Amazon explained how you can talk to an Echo device about a project, and then the next day, you can go to the Amazon website and app, and you can ask something along the lines of “please suggest supplies for the project we talked about,” and thanks to Alexa’s retention of that conversation, you’ll get relevant search results.
Another important thing to highlight is that Alexa for Shopping will not be a fully polished feature with minimal errors. The announcement blog says that Alexa would become “more personal and more helpful over time”, so the service itself will improve based on the data it acquires from you, and other customers overall.
Source: Amazon
