Amazon Brings Alexa Shopping to Text Messages, Letting AI Handle Your Grocery Orders

Amazon is bringing its shopping assistant directly into text messages, making it possible to shop without opening its app. The new feature is called Alexa for Shopping, and it works like texting a personal shopping assistant.

Amazon wants Alexa to handle your shopping through text messages

Instead of browsing through Amazon’s catalog, customers can simply describe what they need. Alexa searches products, compares prices, and sends recommendations directly through text. Customers can also share photos to find similar products.

Need groceries for the week? Send a recipe photo, and Alexa can identify ingredients and add them to the shopping cart. You can also ask it to reorder previously purchased products or find a birthday gift before a particular date.

The assistant can complete purchases with customer approval. However, users can enable auto-buy for eligible purchases when an item reaches their target price. It can also track discounts, monitor new product releases, manage shopping lists, and provide delivery updates.

Image credit: Amazon

Text-based shopping is rolling out to US customers

Amazon is starting with a small group of invited customers in the United States. The company plans to expand access to millions more customers over the coming weeks. Users must accept the terms and link their phone numbers before getting started.

Interestingly, conversations will not remain limited to text messages. Amazon says requests can carry over between messaging, its shopping website, app, and Alexa-enabled devices. The assistant also remembers shopping preferences to make future recommendations more relevant. Amazon says more than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping during the past 12 months. Usage of its agentic shopping features has reportedly increased more than eightfold since January.

In case you are unaware, Amazon recently blocked Meta’s Muse shopping agent from accessing its marketplace. So, it seems that Amazon is getting its own assistant ready to handle those shopping tasks. Speaking of the AI assistant, let’s not forget that Amazon recently launched Alexa+ in India and introduced new Echo devices.