“Our vision for Alexa for Shopping is to make every part of shopping as convenient as possible,” Rajiv Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of conversational shopping, said in an announcement Thursday (Oct. 29).
“Alexa for Shopping can now help with more than 100 brand-new shopping actions, giving customers the ability to handle everything from building a holiday gift list to resolving a billing question just by asking. And this is just the beginning. We’re continuing to invent new ways to save customers time and make shopping even more personal.”
Among the new offerings is the ability to create, add to and edit things like grocery lists and baby registries.
Users can also manage subscriptions by saying things like “Skip my next delivery,” “Pause my subscription,” or “Change my delivery to every three months.”
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Shoppers can also verbally update delivery instructions and resolve billing questions by saying things like “Change the delivery instructions on my account,” or “Where is my refund?”
Amazon introduced Alexa for Shopping in May, combining the company’s AI shopping assistant Rufus, which 300 million customers used last year, and its Alexa+ voice assistant, which is available on hundreds of millions of devices
Meanwhile, the October PYMNTS Intelligence report “From Prompt to Purchase: Who Wins the AI Shopper?” shows that 61 million U.S. consumers now start their online retail research with the help of artificial intelligence assistants.
“A consumer who welcomes AI’s advice can keep control of checkout, return to a trusted marketplace or delegate the purchase,” the report said.
“The central finding is that AI is displacing established research habits faster than it is displacing established buying relationships. Advertising and product visibility face a different competitive challenge from the accounts, saved cards and delivery services that help secure the sale.”
Although overall AI adoption has held steady across personal tasks, more and more shoppers are relying on conversational assistants to winnow down product choices, compare technical features and evaluate prices.
The research also shows that average quarterly spending among AI-assisted shoppers rose 17% to $1,039 in August, showcasing that consumers aren’t only testing these conversational tools for fun, “but using them to spend real money,” PYMNTS wrote recently.
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