A Tiny Fraction Of Amazon Alexa Owners Reportedly Use It For Shopping

Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa has many capabilities and will surely get more as time goes on. One of Alexa’s main uses is to facilitate online shopping by letting customers buy things with nothing but their own voices.

However, a report from The Information indicated that only a tiny fraction of Alexa users shop with the assistant.

The Information heard from two individuals who had seen Amazon’s internal statistics that only 2 percent of Alexa device owners have bought something with them in 2018. Since Amazon has reportedly sold about 50 million Alexa-enabled devices since the assistant’s launch in 2014, roughly 1 million owners have made a purchase this year.

Of those people, 90 percent of them apparently did not make a second purchase afterward, according to The Information. Of course, it is possible that Amazon’s internal estimates are conservative.

The problem seems to be less that shopping with Alexa is difficult or glitchy, and more that voice controls inherently limit the kinds of things customers want to buy. More expensive items like electronics or books usually require some kind of research on the part of the customer, whether it is comparing prices or reading reviews from other customers. According to The Information, Alexa shoppers tended to favor grocery-like items instead.

In general, it seems people use smart assistants for everyday convenience features, like finding out the weather forecast. Though developers have made thousands of apps that add new capabilities to Echo and Home devices, a 2017 report suggested customers have a hard time discovering new ones. Even when they did, people tended not to use them regularly.

Amazon announced in July it had partnered with business technology firm Yext to allow Alexa users to find out restaurant hours and other business information using voice controls. There have also been privacy concerns aimed at Alexa, after the assistant recorded a conversation and sent the recording to one of the owner’s contacts without ever notifying the owner.

Amazon and Google have done head-to-head in the smart speaker market. Echo devices have outsold Home overall, but Google shipped more of its smart speakers in the first quarter of 2018 than Amazon. It was the first fiscal quarter in which that was the case.