Amazon opens Alexa shopping to texts — after blocking Meta

Amazon announced Friday that Alexa can now complete purchases inside text messages, giving it the ability to search for items, compare options, build a cart and check out without opening the shopping app. The new capability is limited to a small invitation-only group of U.S. customers, with plans to widen access in the coming weeks.

Amazon’s invitation-only rollout arrives weeks after it began denying access to Meta’s Muse shopping agent in late September, citing violations of its Conditions of Use. Amazon said the agent operated without proper identification and had not told Amazon it planned to shop on its platform. Its terms require autonomous agents to identify themselves and avoid mimicking human behavior.

Invited users can text Alexa to manage shopping lists, track prices and check order status, share photos of items or outfits to find similar listings, and let the system learn preferences over time. The service requires a personal Amazon account with a verified mobile number and RCS chats enabled on the phone. Conversations can move between text, the Amazon Shopping app, Amazon.com and Alexa-enabled devices.

Sponsored product ads will appear in the text experience, marked as sponsored, though Amazon is not initially charging advertisers for those placements.

The text feature extends Alexa for Shopping, launched May 13, 2026, which combined Rufus’s shopping expertise with Alexa+ personalization across the shopping app, website and Echo Show devices. An October 29, 2026 expansion added over 100 conversational shopping and account actions, including managing subscriptions and payments. Amazon said more than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the past year and that users of its agentic features grew more than eightfold since early 2026. CEO Andy Jassy said customers using the service spend 50% more than those who do not.

The move deepens what retailers call agentic commerce, where AI assistants perform tasks and execute purchases rather than simply answering questions. Meta’s Muse, launched September 8, 2026, lets users shop across multiple retailers and aims to profit from transaction fees instead of advertising. DoorDash introduced its own text-to-order AI agent inside Apple Messages on October 1, 2026, but reported on October 30 that third-party AI agents had placed only several hundred orders on its platform — a negligible fraction of its 3 million daily deliveries — prompting it to focus on its own text-based agent.

Amazon said users not initially invited can sign up for a waitlist as the feature rolls out more broadly.

Image Credits:Amazon