400M Customers Used Alexa for Shopping in 12 Months, Amazon Says

More than 400 million customers used Alexa for Shopping in the last 12 months, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said during the company's fiscal third-quarter earnings call on Thursday. That figure is up from 350 million at the end of July, and it comes with a harder number for marketers: customers who use the assistant spend 50% more than those who do not.

The adoption curve matters because AI-assisted shopping has become a growth lever for Amazon at a moment when its core e-commerce segments have matured. With growth harder to find elsewhere in retail, the assistant now functions as a mechanism that nudges shoppers toward more transactions.

What did the third quarter deliver?

Amazon reported net sales of $201.9 billion for the third quarter, up 12% from last year. AWS drove the bulk of the increase, with segment sales up 39% year over year.

Growth slowed across several e-commerce segments, but the timing of Prime Day explains most of the gap. Amazon held Prime Day at the end of June this year rather than in mid-July, so the event's sales landed in the second quarter instead of the third.

The segment numbers show the shift:

• Online Stores revenue grew 2% year over year, after 10% growth between the third quarter of 2024 and 2025.
• Third-party seller services grew 9% between the third quarter of 2025 and the third quarter of 2026, after 12% the prior year.
• Advertising services grew 11% in the same period, after 24% the prior year.

How did Alexa for Shopping get here?

The public-facing history of the assistant spans three years. Amazon released an AI shopping assistant known as Rufus in February 2024. In May of this year, the company rebranded Rufus as Alexa for Shopping, adopting the name of its voice assistant that many shoppers already used.

Since the rebrand, Amazon has made the assistant more visible across its website and app and has added new capabilities.

On Thursday, Amazon announced more than 100 new capabilities for Alexa for Shopping ahead of the holidays. Shoppers can now create and edit gift lists and registries through queries like "show me what's left on my wedding registry." They can also manage Subscribe and Save through the assistant, including pausing or canceling specific subscriptions.

Will Amazon open its walled garden?

Amazon has drawn attention for blocking AI platforms such as ChatGPT and Meta's Muse shopping agent from scraping its site. Jassy hinted on the call that this may eventually change, as he has said before, but he framed cooperation with outside agents as secondary to Amazon's own strategy.

"Though we anticipate working with horizontal agents, we believe Alexa for Shopping is going to be the primary shopping agent customers use to shop Amazon," Jassy said.

For brands selling on Amazon, the message is direct: the company intends to route as many customers as possible through its own assistant, and the 100-plus new capabilities landing before the holidays signal where merchandising and subscription touchpoints will concentrate this quarter.