Amazon Debuts Shopping Features for Alexa+ Assistant

Amazon is rolling out new shopping features for its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Alexa+.

As reported Tuesday (Dec. 9) by TechCrunch, these features include a shopping hub, a feature that lets users add items to recent orders and personalized recommendations.

The report notes that while Amazon has been developing features to make Alexa+ more of a shopping assistant with abilities such as automated deal tracking and automatic purchases, the company is now turning its screen-outfitted Echo devices into a shopping hub with an interface that it’s calling the “Shopping Essentials” experience.

With this dashboard, Amazon shoppers can monitor deliveries in real time, find information about recent orders, receive reminders about reordering household essentials and see their shopping list and saved items.

The report notes that the ability to add last-minute items to orders is similar to a feature recently introduced for Amazon’s app and web site, but was not live on Alexa devices until now.

The new offerings come amid, as PYMNTS wrote earlier this week, updates to Alexa+ which mark a “significant shift toward agentic AI,” going “beyond scripted commands and toward autonomous task execution.”

Meanwhile, new data from PYMNTS Intelligence shows that as millions of Americans felt greater financial pressures during the summer and fall, they overwhelmingly turned to Amazon.

“Widespread pocketbook tightness helped skyrocket the share of Black Friday shoppers hitting the retail behemoth from 50.8% last year to 55.6%,” PYMNTS wrote Tuesday. “The surge at Seattle-based Amazon came from consumers feeling the pressure of inflation and higher living costs, especially for utilities and housing.”

Close to 60% of consumers who live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to keep up with their monthly bills, shopped the online giant, more than one-quarter more than last year’s 44.1%. Amazon also saw a big jump in popularity with shoppers with annual household income of less than $50,000, from 40.6% to 50.3%.

Budgeting and discipline were the guiding principles this year for the 151 million shoppers who showed up for Black Friday, 7% lower than last year, per PYMNTS Intelligence.

That downturn could be seen at Amazon rival Walmart, the report added. Despite that retailer’s value proposition of “Every Day Low Prices,” just over 1 in 2 (51.55%) of all shoppers showed up in store and online, down from 53.3% in 2024.

“Even some financially struggling consumers stayed away from America’s largest retailer,” PYMNTS added, with the company losing shares of paycheck-to-paycheck shoppers.