Platform & products

Alexa for Shopping

formerly Rufus

Definition

Amazon's built-in AI shopping assistant, renamed from Rufus on May 13, 2026, which answers product questions directly inside the Amazon app and site using Amazon's own catalog and review data.

Defined in The Agentic Commerce Glossary.

How else it gets framed

The same term carries different emphasis depending on the surface it’s used on. Both readings are correct.

Amazon's AI shopping assistant, called Rufus until Amazon renamed it on May 13, 2026, when it combined Rufus and Alexa+. All US customers can use it free in the Amazon app and website (no Prime membership needed), including straight from the search bar. Amazon describes it as Rufus's product expertise brought together with Alexa+'s personal knowledge, and it still answers from the catalog, reviews and the web, so listing work done for Rufus still applies.

Amazon Listing and Ads Operations for Alexa for Shopping (Rufus) →

Where Alexa for Shopping comes up

The guides that put this term to work, rather than just defining it.

Related terms

Agentic Commerce Protocol: An open standard, licensed under Apache 2.0, for how AI agents, buyers and businesses complete purchases through APIs. Released by OpenAI and Stripe on September 29, 2025; Meta joined as a lead maintainer on April 24, 2026. It defines agentic checkout, cart and product feeds, delegated payment, delegated authentication, and order webhooks. The spec is labeled beta.
Agentic Commerce Suite: Stripe's product for selling through AI agents, launched December 11, 2025. A seller shares a catalog feed with Stripe; Stripe syndicates products to connected agents, manages the checkout, processes the payment and sends the seller an order event. Each stage can be taken over by the seller. Stripe describes it as working across protocols, including ACP and Google's UCP.
Shared Payment Token: A Stripe payment credential an AI agent grants to a seller: a scoped, limited reference to the buyer's payment method, tied to the seller's Stripe profile with a maximum amount and an expiry. The seller charges it like a card and never sees the card number. OpenAI's docs call it the first implementation of OpenAI's Delegated Payment Spec.
Agentic checkout: A checkout initiated or completed by an AI agent for a shopper, either inside the AI surface the shopper is using or on the merchant's site, using payment credentials the shopper has authorized. The merchant remains the seller and merchant of record; the agent handles the steps a person would otherwise click through.
Agentic e-commerce: Online selling in which AI agents, rather than people, carry out some of the shopping steps: searching catalogs, comparing products against a shopper's constraints, and in some channels completing checkout after the shopper confirms. Also called agentic commerce or agentic AI e-commerce.
Agentic commerce: Commerce transactions initiated, researched, or completed with an AI agent acting on the shopper's behalf, rather than a human clicking through a storefront unassisted.

All 164 terms

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