Amazon’s Alexa shopping agent now takes orders by text message

Amazon says customers can now text Alexa for Shopping, its AI shopping agent, to search for products, fill a cart and complete a purchase. The feature starts with a subset of US customers by invitation, according to Amazon’s newsroom post, as The Information also reported.

Invitation first, a wider rollout within weeks

The rollout is limited for now. Amazon says a small group of US customers will receive a text inviting them to try the service, and that it will reach “millions more customers in the coming weeks.” To start, a customer accepts the terms, links a phone number and begins texting. The contact appears on the phone as “Alexa Shopping.”

People who have no invitation can sign up on an Amazon page at amazon.com/text-alexa-shopping to be notified when more invites go out. That sign-up also covers news and offers by text. Amazon’s post names no price and no countries outside the US, and it does not say what limits apply to use.

What the text agent can actually do

Amazon describes the service as an agent that takes action rather than only answering questions. A customer writes in plain language, and Alexa for Shopping searches, compares options and replies with suggestions. When the customer is ready, it adds items to the cart and completes the purchase. Reorders are bought with the customer’s approval.

Amazon lists a range of tasks it can handle in one thread:

• Multi-part to-do lists, such as pet food, a birthday gift and household supplies together.
• Weekly grocery orders, recipe ingredients added from a photo, and same-day delivery requests.
• Finding similar products from a photo.
• Price alerts, new-release alerts and list management.
• Order status checks.
• Product comparisons with up to a year of price history.
• Discovery of products from across the web through Shop Direct.

The agent also learns preferences over time, for example vegan-only products, according to Amazon. Conversations can continue across text, the Amazon Shopping app, Amazon.com and Alexa-enabled devices. Order updates, delivery notifications and deals are to appear in the same thread over time.

Rajiv Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of conversational shopping, put the pitch this way: “Message it what you need, and Alexa goes to work on your behalf.”

Amazon’s usage claims and the Muse backdrop

Amazon says more than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the last 12 months, and that use of its agentic features has grown more than eight times since the start of the year. Those figures come from Amazon and are not independently verified.

The launch also lands after a public dispute over who gets to shop on Amazon’s behalf. TechCrunch reported that Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse AI agent from querying Amazon.com in September 2026. Offering its own agent over SMS gives Amazon a direct line to shoppers, without a third-party assistant standing between the customer and the store. That reading is an inference from the sequence of events; Amazon’s post does not mention Muse.

Amazon is not alone in finding that outside agents are slow to gain traction. According to TechCrunch, DoorDash said in October that third-party AI agents had placed only several hundred orders on its platform, and the company plans to focus on its own text-based ordering agent, which launched in September 2026. Two large commerce platforms moving toward their own text agents suggests that retailers want to keep the conversation, and the customer data that comes with it, in-house.

Text is also becoming a common channel for assistants beyond shopping. Our recent report on OpenAI opening outbound phone calling to developers shows voice heading the same way, onto the networks people already use.

What the announcement leaves open

Several practical questions remain. Amazon does not give a launch date for the broad rollout beyond “the coming weeks,” and it does not describe spending limits, how purchases are confirmed beyond the reorder approval, or how an agent-placed order can be undone. It does not say how message data is stored. The post also gives no breakdown of how many of the 400 million customers used agentic features specifically.

For shoppers, the change is mainly convenience: a request can be sent from the default messaging app without opening the Amazon app. Whether people will trust a text thread to spend their money, and how well it handles vague requests, can only be judged once the invitations reach more users.