Amazon’s shopping agent now takes orders by text, with Sponsored Product ads in the replies

Once in, customers link a phone number, accept the terms and get a new contact called “Alexa Shopping.” From there they message it the way they’d message a friend. Reorder the laundry detergent from last month. Build a grocery shop from a photo of a recipe. Find a birthday present that arrives by Saturday. Alexa for Shopping searches, compares options and texts back with suggestions, then adds the chosen items to the cart and checks out when told to. Customers who’d rather not be asked can switch on auto-buy and let the agent pull the trigger when a price hits their target.

The ad opportunity sits in the discovery stage of that text exchange. When the agent texts back a set of options, a Sponsored Product can be one of them, which puts brands inside one of the most personal channels on a phone with room for a handful of products at most. Amazon has kept ads to that moment, while the customer is still choosing. Slipping one into a purchase the agent makes is a bigger gamble. After all, no one who asks Alexa to reorder dog food when the price drops wants to find out the bag on the doorstep was the one a brand paid for rather than the one they’d have picked. 

Amazon isn’t charging for these placements yet, which gives it a cheap way to test how much advertising people will put up with in a text thread — and there’s no shortage of people to test it on. More than 400 million customers have used Alexa for Shopping in the past 12 months, according to Amazon, and use of its agentic features has grown more than eightfold since January. 

“Any new ad placement is generally seen as an interesting test and this approach from Amazon is no different,” said independent ad tech consultant Jonathan D’Sousa-Rauto. “Amazon are already well known for putting ad slots on the order confirmation page, which whilst generates ad revenue, could be considered non-incremental for most advertisers. As agentic commerce meets advertising, the definition of an impression is critical as well as the reporting and measurement, to understand if it is truly driving efficiency for brands.”

The feature is designed to work across Amazon’s shopping app, website and Alexa-enabled devices, while those text conversations can carry between them. A request started over text carries into the Amazon Shopping app, the site and Alexa-enabled devices and back again. People can send photos of something spotted while scrolling and ask for lookalikes. They can set price alerts or tell the agent to watch for new launches, with Amazon’s own example being a budget when Nike drops new running shoes. The agent also keeps a running tally of preferences. Mention veganism or marathon training once and it shapes the recommendations that follow. Through Shop Direct, it can also surface and buy products from stores beyond Amazon. 

“Customers often jot down what they need the moment they think of it in their notes, in their messages, in their group chats,” said Rajiv Mehta, vp of conversational shopping at Amazon. “Now with Alexa for Shopping, your personal shopping agent is just a text away. Message it what you need and Alexa goes to work on your behalf—searching, comparing, and buying so you can get on with your day.”

This text thread is the latest installment of Amazon’s evolving ad business.

In March, Sponsored Products and Brands prompts arrived, followed by Alexa for Shopping, which replaced Rufus in May and took over the main search bar in the app. This was then followed by Alexa+ Agentic Ads which was announced at Cannes Lions this summer, before the company’s advertiser platform was rebranded as Amazon Ads Agent. During the same month, Amazon blocked Meta’s AI shopping agent Muse, stating that the agent accessed its platform without prior notification, failure to properly identify itself and reportedly captured and stored customers’ details.