Amazon Adds 100-Plus Alexa Shopping Functions as Spend Per Order Jumps 50%

Shoppers who use Alexa for Shopping spend 50% more per order than those who do not, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts during the company's Q3 earnings call. The figure lands as Amazon rolls out more than 100 new shopping capabilities for the assistant, which the company announced in an Oct. 29 post.

The new functions let U.S. shoppers create and change registries, manage subscriptions, change delivery instructions and answer billing and payments inquiries. Everything is available inside the Amazon Shopping app and online.

How big is adoption?

Amazon said over 400 million customers have used Alexa for Shopping in the past 12 months. That is a large base, though the company did not break out how many use it regularly versus trying it once — a distinction that matters when judging an assistant's real traction.

"Our vision for Alexa for Shopping is to make every part of shopping as convenient as possible," Rajiv Mehta, vice president of conversational shopping, said in a company blog post. "This is just the beginning. We're continuing to invent new ways to save customers time and make shopping even more personal."

The promise of more invention arrives with a caveat: none of the 100-plus functions was accompanied by usage targets or a rollout timeline beyond the U.S. market.

Amazon launched the shopping assistant in May, replacing its Rufus assistant. The swap came quickly by product-cycle standards, and the new numbers suggest the bet is paying off — at least on the spend-per-order metric Amazon chose to highlight.

Why is Amazon fighting other AI agents?

While Amazon pushes its own assistant, it is clashing with rivals building agents that touch its marketplace. In September, Amazon asked Meta to scrub its e-commerce site from the Muse AI agent experience. Amazon said it received no advance notice of Meta's integration and never granted permission.

The friction is not new. Amazon took Perplexity to court last year because its Comet AI agent made Amazon purchases on consumers' behalf.

The pattern is consistent: Amazon wants AI-driven commerce flowing through Alexa for Shopping, not through third-party agents. Jassy made that explicit on the earnings call. "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," he said.

What did the numbers show in Q3?

Alexa for Shopping was a bright spot in Amazon's third-quarter report:

• Online store net sales rose 2% year over year to $68.5 billion.
• Physical store sales rose 2% to $5.7 billion.

The 2% growth rates are modest, which makes the 50% higher spend per order among Alexa users stand out as the more consequential data point for marketers watching conversational commerce (shopping conducted through AI dialogue rather than clicks).

The unresolved question is whether third-party agents will win access to Amazon's catalog on their terms, or whether the retailer can hold the line — the Meta dispute and the Perplexity lawsuit suggest that fight has only started.