Amazon has a new AI shopping assistant called Alexa for Shopping, and it can do more than just help you find products. The tool can track prices, compare products side by side, auto-buy items when they hit a price you set, and schedule recurring purchases like pet food or paper towels. It is available now to all U.S. customers on the Amazon app and website. Alexa for Shopping replaces Amazon's previous chatbot, Rufus, which we didn’t find particularly useful in our testing. Amazon says it has folded Rufus's features into this new tool, along with some features borrowed from Alexa+.
You do not need a Prime membership, an Alexa+ subscription, or an Echo device to use it. You just have to tap the cursive "A" icon in the Amazon app or on the website to get started. If you have an Echo Show, it works there too.
What Alexa for Shopping can do
You can ask Alexa for Shopping to set a price alert for a specific item when viewing its page, like "let me know when these headphones are 30% off," and it will monitor the price and notify you. You can even tell it to auto-buy an item when it drops to a certain price, using your default payment method. Auto Buy only works on items fulfilled by Amazon, so you can count on it being shipped from Amazon's warehouse. And while many of Alexa for Shopping’s features are available to everyone, Auto Buy requires an Amazon Prime membership.
On top of that, you can schedule recurring purchases, so things like laundry detergent or dog food get added to your cart automatically each month. Alexa adds the items to your cart on a recurring basis, then you review them and check out yourself. This makes it different than Subscribe and Save, which automatically ships your scheduled items. On one hand, the new review/checkout process creates an extra step. However, for those of us who have Subscribe and Save items suddenly show up our door when we don't really need them, the new recurring purchase scheduling may be the better option.
Finally, Alexa for Shopping now gives you a full year of price history for products, up from a max of 90 days, previously. That should be a big help in figuring out whether a deal is actually a deal or just the regular price that was artificially inflated and then dropped.
Great for Prime Day, but not without a few caveats
With Prime Day confirmed for June and household budgets tighter than they have been in a while, these are the kinds of AI features that could come in really handy. Prime Day can be pretty overwhelming, with thousands of deals across dozens of categories. Having a tool that tracks the prices for the products you care about and alerts you when something hits your target takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.
Alexa for Shopping will include sponsored products in its recommendations, which is pretty standard for Amazon at this point. The company says they will only appear where they are relevant, but that makes it even more important to keep an eye out for paid placements.
I think this is one of the more promising uses of AI in consumer tech right now. It is just helping you spend less on things you were going to buy anyway. The auto-buy feature does require some trust, though, since you are letting Amazon charge your card automatically. However, you set the price threshold yourself, and, according to the Amazon Auto Buy FAQ, you can always cancel within the first 24 hours.
[Image credit: Screenshots via Techlicious, phone mockup via Canva]
