Amazon lets shoppers text its Alexa for Shopping agent to search, compare and buy

Amazon on Friday began letting customers shop by text message, sending requests to Alexa for Shopping, its AI shopping agent, which searches for products, compares options and places orders with the customer's approval. The feature started rolling out to a small group of U.S. customers by invitation, and the Seattle company says millions more will get access in the coming weeks. Customers who have not been invited can sign up to be among the first to hear when more invitations go out.

Customers who opt in accept the terms, link a phone number and get a new contact called "Alexa Shopping." They can ask it to start a weekly grocery order, turn a photo of a recipe into a cart, find a birthday gift that arrives by Saturday or reorder dog food. The agent can also watch for price drops, show up to a year of price history, check on packages and manage lists, and customers can switch on auto-buy so it purchases an item when the price hits a target. Amazon says a conversation started by text carries over to the Amazon app, the website and Alexa devices, and that the agent learns preferences over time.

The launch lands just before the holiday shopping season and in the middle of a fight over who controls online shopping when agents do the buying. Amazon blocked Meta's Muse agent from querying its store in September and has moved to keep outside agents from shopping its site while it builds its own. 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.