Amazon Invites Selected US Shoppers to Buy by Texting Its Alexa Agent

Amazon said on Friday that a small group of invited US customers can now use its Alexa shopping assistant over text messages to search for products, compare them and complete purchases. The move places the company's own conversational agent at the centre of its consumer AI offering, at a moment when technology firms are competing to establish text messaging as a standard interface for AI assistants and platforms are weighing how much access third-party agents should have to their storefronts.

Under the arrangement, selected customers receive a text asking them to enable the feature; those not invited can join a waitlist. The contact appears on the phone as "Amazon Alexa," and Amazon says users can write natural-language requests covering product searches, cart additions and purchases, as well as list management, price and deal tracking, order-status checks and web-wide searches. Users can also send a photograph of an item or of someone wearing an outfit to find similar listings, and the company says Alexa will learn individual preferences over time and suggest items accordingly. The capability extends Alexa for Shopping, which Amazon launched in May.

Rajiv Mehta, Amazon's vice president of conversational shopping, framed the feature around convenience: "Customers often jot down what they need the moment they think of it in their notes, in their messages, in their group chats," he said, adding that the agent would handle searching, comparing and buying "so you can get on with your day." The launch lands just before the holiday shopping season. It also follows Amazon's September block on Meta's Muse agent querying its site; separately, Amazon obtained a March court order against Perplexity's Comet agent, which a US appeals court lifted in August, with the case still under consideration.

The wider field remains early. DoorDash said last month that third-party agents had placed only hundreds of orders in total on its platform, and that it would concentrate on its own text-based agent launched in September; OpenAI introduced text messaging with its personal agent, Dot, last month. Amazon says the shopping feature will reach "millions more customers" in the coming weeks, the point at which its practical uptake can first be gauged.