Amazon: 400 Million Customers Used Alexa for Shopping in a Year

More than 400 million customers have used Alexa for Shopping in the last 12 months, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company's fiscal third-quarter earnings call on Thursday. That figure is up from 350 million at the end of July.

The growth number carries a harder commercial edge. Customers who use Alexa for Shopping spend 50% more than those who do not, according to Jassy. That gap explains why Amazon keeps pushing shoppers toward the conversational assistant: it converts.

The figures arrive as AI shopping has become a growth lever for a business that has matured, at a time when growth in other areas is harder to come by. Amazon reported third-quarter net sales of $201.9 billion, up 12% year over year. The bulk of that growth came from Amazon Web Services, where segment sales rose 39%.

Why did e-commerce segments slow?

Growth in many of Amazon's e-commerce-related segments decelerated during the quarter, but the cause is largely a calendar shift. Prime Day ran at the end of June this year rather than mid-July, so Amazon recorded those sales in the second quarter. Last year, they landed in the third.

The segment picture for the quarter:

• Online Stores revenue grew 2% year over year. A year earlier, Amazon reported 10% growth for the same period.
• Third-party seller services grew 9%, down from 12% the prior year.
• Advertising services grew 11%, down from 24%.

What does Alexa for Shopping change for marketers?

For practitioners, the practical question is what this changes. The answer is placement and capability. Amazon has made the assistant more visible across its website and app since rebranding it, and it keeps adding functions that pull routine shopping tasks into the conversational layer.

The public-facing product is three years old. Amazon released an AI shopping assistant known as Rufus in February 2024. In May of this year, it rebranded Rufus as Alexa for Shopping, adopting the name of the voice assistant many shoppers already knew.

On Thursday, Amazon announced more than 100 new capabilities ahead of the holidays. Shoppers can now create and edit gift lists and registries through queries such as "show me what's left on my wedding registry." They can also manage Subscribe and Save through the assistant, including pausing or canceling subscriptions.

Will the walled garden open?

Amazon has drawn attention for blocking AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Meta's Muse shopping agent from scraping its site. Jassy hinted on Thursday that this may eventually change — a point he has made before — but he framed any external partnerships as secondary.

"Though we anticipate working with horizontal agents, we believe Alexa for Shopping is going to be the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon," Jassy said.

For brands and agencies, the signal is direct: Amazon intends to route as much purchase behavior as possible through its own assistant, and the 100-plus new holiday capabilities show where it is investing to make that happen.