Amazon is putting the eCommerce experience on notice again with Alexa in the Shopping App

In the spring of 2022, Amazon placed its voice assistant inside the Amazon shopping app. It was a relatively quiet event obtaining coverage by a few media outlets. The impact on user experience is much more significant.

Any eCommerce business has been affected by Amazon. Surely by market size, but also Amazon affecting customer expectations.  Most analysts focus on the size of the marketplace, the number of items, and the streamlined fulfillment that Amazon has optimized. Yet, there is another subject that is often overshadowed by the other: user interface.

 Amazon has taken great care to optimize the experience the consumer has on a small mobile screen, a piece of real estate the customer checks 96 times [1] and spends over 6 hours[2] a day on. eCommerce apps don’t just compete for product purchases; they compete for time. It is the intersection of the attention economy and the convenience economy.

 By placing Alexa in their shopping app, Amazon plays to the human mind and behavior in a powerful way. Amazon is leveraging multimodality to reduce cognitive load while being incredibly efficient with the consumer’s time. A win in the attention economy and a win in the convenience economy.

 Alexa launched in 2014 and has been training consumers ever since on how to speak to voice assistants across the board. The first iteration of Voice Shopping with Alexa was outside of the app, letting consumers add specific items to lists and their carts. This was most convenient for items you had ordered previously due to the consumer’s known history and the likelihood of remaining brand loyal.

 By placing the voice assistant in the shopping experience, Amazon is blowing the doors open to product discovery by being able to leverage a visual modality in concert with voice. Consider this:

• Dictation is 3-7 times faster than typing/clicking
• Consumers think of products in their terms, not the brands
• Voice commands can reduce tap/swipe UX steps by up to 100%
• Voice as a UI for faceted search can speed product discoverability up to 10X

 The underlying function of an assistant in a shopping context is a voice user interface. While AI behind the scenes surfaces the correct context and visual modalities to the user, the result is fast, accurate and contextual information and action making their lives more convenient.

 Many brands will follow Amazon down this path, as they should. Some may work with large internal teams to develop the capability from scratch. But there is an easier way. With the Voicify Voice UI and Conversational AI platform, brands can cut their time to launch by a factor of 10 and significantly reduce the level of effort internally. This is because Voicify leverages existing taxonomies, features, and functions our clients already have in their mobile apps. Voicify is an extension of those capabilities, not a reinvention. The results are staggering and meaningful for the business and consumers alike.

[1] https://www.zippia.com/advice/smartphone-usage-statistics/

[2] https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-stats

About Voicify 

Voicify, LLC is the world’s only end-to-end solution for creating, managing, and optimizing enterprise-owned voice assistants. Our platform enables brands to create highly engaging and personalized voice experiences that can be automatically deployed to web and mobile products and services and a broad array of voice platforms, including Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, IVR telephony systems, and more. 

Learn more at www.voicify.com.

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