Amazon on October 29 said its AI shopping assistant, Alexa for Shopping, can now carry out more than 100 new shopping and account actions through conversation, from building gift lists and registries to pausing Subscribe & Save deliveries and checking on refunds. The capabilities are available now to all U.S. Amazon customers, the company said in its announcement.

Amazon also gave two usage figures. It said more than 400 million customers have used Alexa for Shopping in the last 12 months, and that the number of customers using the assistant’s agentic features has grown more than eight times since the start of the year. The company did not say which features it counts as agentic or give the starting number.

What the new actions cover

Amazon grouped the additions into five areas:

  • Lists and registries: creating, adding to and editing lists, such as grocery lists, baby registries and holiday wish lists, and moving items between them.
  • Subscribe & Save: skipping or pausing a delivery and changing how often it arrives.
  • Prime and other subscriptions: checking Prime benefits, how much a customer has saved with Prime this year and when other subscriptions renew.
  • Delivery instructions: changing or adding instructions on the account or for a specific address.
  • Payments and billing: resolving billing questions such as an unrecognized charge, viewing gift card balances and checking on refunds.

Customers reach the assistant through the Alexa icon in the Amazon Shopping app, or at the top of the screen on desktop. “Our vision for Alexa for Shopping is to make every part of shopping as convenient as possible,” said Rajiv Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of Conversational Shopping. “And this is just the beginning.”

What the assistant already does

Amazon’s explainer on the assistant, updated the same day, says it has helped U.S. customers research and buy products since launching in February 2024. The October announcement does not mention Rufus, the name Amazon used for its agentic AI shopping assistant in a March 2026 post. According to the explainer, existing features include:

  • Price history for the past 30, 90 and 365 days.
  • Price alerts and auto-buy: a shopper sets a target, such as a price or a percentage off, and the assistant checks prices regularly and either sends an alert or completes the purchase “using your default payment method” when the target is reached.
  • Scheduled Actions, which run recurring or one-time shopping tasks, such as restocking household items, and either notify the shopper or add items to the cart for the shopper to review and check out.
  • “Update Me When” alerts, which check Amazon and the broader web for new releases.
  • Questions asked directly in the main Amazon search bar, and AI-generated overviews in search results and on product pages, which Amazon said are rolling out to all U.S. shoppers.

Shopping beyond Amazon’s store

The assistant also surfaces products Amazon does not sell through Shop Direct. In a March 2026 post, Amazon said Shop Direct included more than 100 million products from more than 400,000 merchants, with tens of millions available through Buy for Me, a feature in which Amazon’s AI completes the purchase on the merchant’s website using the customer’s encrypted payment and shipping details.

In that post, Amazon said merchants could connect their catalogs, pricing and inventory through feed providers including Feedonomics, Salsify and CEDCommerce, with an Amazon merchant portal and a merchant-direct feed “coming soon.” For Buy for Me orders, the merchant receives the customer’s name and address and manages delivery, returns, exchanges and customer service. Amazon said merchants can also opt out of the program.

Why it matters

For brands and sellers, the update moves more routine account and reorder tasks into a conversation with the assistant. Amazon describes Alexa for Shopping as drawing on “hundreds of millions of products and their detailed information and reviews, plus customers’ shopping history,” so product information and reviews are part of what it draws on when it compares options for a shopper. Features such as auto-buy at a target price and Scheduled Actions also mean some purchases are triggered by a shopper’s standing instructions rather than a fresh visit to a product page.

For merchants that do not sell on Amazon, Shop Direct and Buy for Me mean the assistant can send shoppers to their sites or buy from them on a customer’s behalf. Under the terms Amazon described in March, the merchant handles delivery, customer service and returns for those orders.

The caveats

The usage figures come from Amazon, which did not define “agentic features” or publish a baseline for the eightfold growth. Amazon calls Alexa for Shopping “the best personal AI agent for shopping,” which is the company’s own characterization. The explainer does not describe spending limits or confirmation steps for auto-buy, and the Shop Direct merchant and product counts date from March 2026.