The last couple of days I used Alexa for shopping to buy more things than the la
By Bradley Sutton · May 25, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
The last couple of days I used Alexa for shopping to buy more things than the last 8 years of having Alexa in my home or Rufus the last 2 years.
Does this change how Amazon brands need to prepare their listings or deprioritize keyword research? Absolutely not.
First of all, why have I not bought stuff with my 8 echo devices for years? Because the buying experience is not better than traditional search find buy on mobile app.
Even Amazon knows this which is why they announced last week that they are bringing traditional search to the echo show devices.
Rufus I’d use a lot for review summaries and compatibility questions and things like that but just didn’t check out with it.
I’ve always been vocal about the main use case for Rufus and now Alexa being not to replace traditional search when you know what you want already, but rather to either help filter down results or to search for things you don’t know what you want yet. The kind of stuff previously you’d do before you get to Amazon.
My two use cases the last two days?
1. In the past I had bought cardboard boxes for shipping from my warehouses from various suppliers. I did not use Alexa to pull up that list because it’s still faster to just type “boxes” in my orders list than to have a full conversation with Alexa. But once I got that list then I asked Alexa to tell me which one of my previous orders delivered fastest (neither were prime) so that I could order the faster one. Checked out right within Alexa. Wonderful experience. The fact this is a use case means zero to the brands I purchased from. They got my original sale from traditional Amazon SEO.
2. I’ve been sick and wanted to get better before my trip to Korea. So searched emergen C on Amazon. Found one but when I looked at nutritional I saw it had 8 carbs. I’m doing low carb. I wasn’t sure if there was a such thing as low carb emergen c. So I asked Alexa if there were any that could be delivered in 3 hours that had less than 8 carbs. Had no idea there was 0 carb emergen c. If I did I would have searched for that (and the product recommended is page one position one in organic Amazon search for low carb emergen c)
In both situations Alexa did something much more efficient than I could have which is why I used it. In both situations there’s nothing the brands should have done differently to get my sale though than they already have been doing. Stop thinking the game has completely changed. You SHOULD be optimizing for Alexa/rufus as I’ve said for years. But it’s not going to (for now) replace traditional buying experience in most cases