Amazon’s AI shopping agent moves into text messages, taking orders and tracking prices
Amazon is letting customers text its Alexa for Shopping AI agent to search for products, compare options and place orders, starting with a small group of invited U.S. customers. Digiday reports that sponsored products can appear among the options the agent texts back, free to advertisers for now. Read More
Amazon is rolling out a new feature to let customers shop by text message — sending requests to its Alexa for Shopping AI agent, which will search for products, compare options and place orders on their behalf.
The idea is to make shopping work more like messaging a personal assistant. Amazon says the agent works in the background after it gets a request or a photo, and texts back when the task is done.
It’s part throwback and part hot new thing, reflecting a broader shift in how tech companies are offering AI agents for everyday use. OpenAI added texting to Dot, its personal AI agent, last month, and DoorDash rolled out text ordering in September.
The expansion of Amazon’s AI shopping assistant comes amid a larger fight over who controls online shopping when agents do the buying. Amazon has moved to block outside agents from Meta, Perplexity, Google and OpenAI from shopping its site while building its own.
The text thread is also a new place for Amazon to sell. The company says order updates, delivery notifications and deals will eventually land in the same conversation.
Digiday reports that sponsored products can appear among the options the agent texts back, free to advertisers for now, while purchases the agent completes on its own stay ad-free. Amazon reported $68.6 billion in advertising sales in 2025.
The text feature started rolling out Friday to a small group of U.S. customers by invitation, and millions more will get access in the coming weeks, the company says.
Customers who opt in get a contact called “Alexa Shopping” and can send it requests that range from a note that they’re out of dog food to a photo of a recipe they want turned into a grocery order, according to Amazon’s examples.
The agent searches, texts back with options and completes the purchase with the customer’s approval. Customers can also turn on auto-buy to have it purchase an item automatically when the price hits their target. It can also watch for price drops, reorder past purchases and check on packages, and Amazon says a conversation started by text will carry over to the Amazon app, the website and Alexa devices.
Amazon launched Alexa for Shopping in May, merging its Rufus shopping chatbot with Alexa+, the generative AI version of its voice assistant.
