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Will early deal notifications bring shoppers to Alexa?

Written by Tom Ryan
Alexa will now notify Prime customers up to 24 hours in advance of upcoming deals as Amazon.com seeks to pack more value as a shopping tool into its nearly eight-year-old voice assistant. Eligible items for advance notice include those on the Alexa user’s Amazon wish list and in their shopping cart, or items marked “saved for later” on the platform. When the feature is enabled, a Yellow Ring light or a pop-up notification appears on the Echo device. Asking “Alexa, what are my notifications?” prompts Alexa to detail which deals have become available. Users can further ask, “Alexa, buy it for me,” to automatically order the item when a deal becomes available. The new feature complements Alexa’s existing shopping tools, such as Reorder Notifications, which notifies shoppers when essentials frequently purchased from Amazon may be running low. Adding items to shopping lists and answering questions on items are also commonly-used shopping features. Surveys show voice shopping only slowly gaining traction as a purchasing tool. Amazon added Alexa-only deals in 2016 to incentivize usage. Vixen Labs' “Voice Consumer Index 2021” encouragingly found 30 percent of U.S. respondents using their voice assistant daily and 58 percent using them at least monthly. Consumers are still mostly using the devices for music, news and weather. Around shopping, half of U.S. respondents regularly or sometimes use their voice assistant to search for info on products and services, 40 percent to find information about brands and a quarter to make purchases. Voicebot’s “Voice Shopping Consumer Adoption Report 2021” showed 17.5 percent of U.S. adults have used voice shopping at least once, up from 8.2 percent in 2018. Sixty-three percent, however, are unlikely or very unlikely to use voice commerce. Voicebot said in the report, “We see similar trends in the mid-1990s related to web adoption. Consumers can imagine how they would use something until they do and then adoption ensues. So, voice shopping is growing but future growth will hinge on greater awareness and a shift in the perceived benefit of speaking instead of tapping or clicking. There will also need to be more supply of voice shopping experiences. Few of these actually exist today.”

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