Amazon Opens Invite-Only Text Shopping With Alexa Before Holiday Rush

Amazon flipped the switch Friday on text-based shopping, handing a small group of invited US customers early access to its new Alexa for Shopping agent. The idea is dead simple: you text a contact labeled 'Alexa Shopping' the way you'd text a friend, and the assistant hunts down what you want. It is invite-only for now, with Amazon saying millions more will get in over the coming weeks and a waitlist open for everyone else.

The agent does more than fetch links. It can drop items in your cart, push a purchase through, flag price drops, and pull pricing history going back as far as a year. It also wrangles shopping lists, tracks packages, and reaches beyond Amazon's own shelves through a feature called Shop Direct.

Amazon says the thing actually learns. Ask for organic or vegan options only, and it files that away for next time. Rajiv Mehta, the company's vice president of Conversational Shopping, framed it as customers simply texting Alexa what they want so the assistant can go find it.

You are not locked to your phone either. A request started in a text can be picked up later on the Amazon app, the website, or an Alexa device, and the reverse works too. Yahoo Finance reported that Amazon has not put a dollar figure on what it expects the feature to earn.

The timing is not accidental, and neither is the walled garden. In September Amazon blocked Meta's Muse shopping tool, claiming it reached Amazon without permission and stashed customer login details, per TechCrunch. Amazon also went after Perplexity's Comet agent and won a court order blocking it in March, though a US appeals court lifted that ban in August and the fight rolls on.

Everyone wants this market. DoorDash said outside AI agents have only managed a few hundred orders on its app, so it is building its own text assistant instead, while Meta's Muse and Google's Universal Cart keep circling. By keeping shoppers inside Alexa, Amazon controls how they find and buy things rather than handing that power to someone else's bot.