Amazon first expanded Alexa for Shopping in May, giving customers an AI-assisted way to place orders. Now it is pushing that assistant into a more familiar, and potentially more intimate, place: the text thread.¹

The company began rolling out the feature Friday to a small group of US customers, who receive a message inviting them to chat with a contact listed as “Amazon Alexa.” They can describe an item, send a photo, ask for gifts or groceries, compare products, add goods to a cart and purchase them through natural-language texts. Amazon says Alexa can also track prices and deals, remember preferences — such as a customer’s tendency to seek vegan options — and check order status.¹

Rajiv Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Conversational Shopping, framed the move as an answer to the fragmented way people already make shopping notes: “Now with Alexa for Shopping, your personal shopping agent is just a text away.”¹ Amazon says the test will reach millions more US customers in the coming weeks; people not initially invited can join a waitlist.²

The timing is hardly accidental. The launch lands just before the holiday-shopping rush, when convenience can translate quickly into orders. It also follows Amazon’s September decision to block Meta’s Muse from querying its site — a reminder that the company wants AI-mediated shopping to happen through systems it controls.²

Amazon is not alone in treating SMS as the new front door for AI agents. OpenAI introduced texting with its personal agent Dot last month, while DoorDash launched text-based ordering in September. But DoorDash has said third-party agents had generated only hundreds of orders on its platform, and it too is concentrating on its own text agent.¹ The shared bet is clear: as shoppers hand more routine decisions to AI, the platform that owns the conversation may own the checkout.