Amazon will let customers shop by text message. Select US customers will receive an SMS inviting them to enable a feature that lets them chat with the company's Alexa AI agent over text — searching for products, adding items to a cart, and completing purchases in natural language.
The agent builds on the shopping upgrades Amazon has shipped to Alexa through the year. It can manage lists, track prices, search for items across the web, compare products, check order status, and accept a photo — of an object, or of someone wearing an outfit — to find similar listings on Amazon. Over time, the company says, Alexa will learn a user's preferences and make suggestions accordingly. Users who are not invited can join a waitlist; a broader rollout is planned in the coming weeks.
The timing is deliberate on two fronts. It arrives before the holiday shopping season, and it follows Amazon's decision in September to block Meta's Muse from querying its site — making Amazon one of the first large platforms to close its catalogue to a third-party AI agent while building its own.
That is the strategic point. Text-based agents are becoming the interface through which consumers ask for things, and the platforms that own the catalogue would rather answer than be queried. DoorDash offered a reality check last month: the delivery company said 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.
For Amazon the arithmetic is simple. It already has the catalogue, the payment rails, the order history and the address book — everything an agent needs to complete a purchase without the customer ever seeing a product page. What gets lost is precisely what carries Amazon's advertising business: browsing, sponsored placements, impulse buys. An agent that answers a question instead of returning a results page is more efficient for the shopper and less lucrative for the marketplace.
How that resolves depends on a number Amazon does not publish: how often customers actually hand the purchase to the agent instead of looking for themselves.
