Marketplace Briefing: Amazon’s shopping bot Rufus can now automatically buy products for you when prices drop

To summon the feature, shoppers must navigate to a product detail page and click on the chat bubble icon in the bottom corner that activates Amazon’s Rufus shopping agent. From there, a user can input a request such as, “Buy these headphones for me when they’re 30% off,” or “Buy these dumbbells for me when the price falls to $25.” Rufus will then ask the user to confirm the pricing details, which involves checking a box labelled “Auto Buy” to ensure the bot doesn’t make purchases without the shopper’s consent. Users “have 24 hours to cancel before it ships,” according to the fine print in Rufus when Modern Retail tested the Auto Buy functionality.

When a customer makes such a request, Rufus will complete the purchase if and when the specified discount or target price is met. The idea is to ensure “shoppers never miss limited-time holiday discounts while focusing on what matters most during the busy season,” according to Amazon. Auto Buy is available to all U.S. Prime members through the Amazon app.

The tool was announced with little fanfare, even though it marks one of Amazon’s clearest steps yet toward truly agentic shopping, where AI tools don’t just recommend items but actually complete transactions on a consumer’s behalf.

Amazon has described other initiatives, like its “Buy for Me” feature, as agentic, as well. That tool, which Amazon unveiled in February, allows shoppers to purchase products from third-party websites without leaving Amazon’s app. “Buy for Me” uses “agentic AI capabilities” to provide third-party websites with shoppers’ encrypted payment and shipping information, according to Amazon. But while “Buy for Me” helps customers browse, compare and add items to cart, the shoppers still have to approve and execute the purchase.

By comparison, Amazon’s new Auto Buy function in Rufus continuously and autonomously monitors prices every 30 minutes, according to Amazon’s announcement. The shopper doesn’t have to stay logged in, refresh a page or manually re-engage — the tool executes purchases when preset conditions are met.

Still, the question remains whether consumers will trust that Rufus won’t accidentally purchase something a user was only browsing out of curiosity, for example. Shoppers may also realize far too late that they no longer want a set of garden tools they put on watch months ago and forgot about. To Will Haire, co-founder and CEO of BellaVix, a marketing agency that works with around 30 online merchants, success will hinge on customers using the “Auto Buy” feature in the first place.

“It feels a bit like handing the casino your credit card,” Haire said. “Still, anything that removes friction from checkout is a win for both Amazon and sellers.”

Juozas Kaziukėnas, an independent e-commerce analyst, also said that adoption may be slow because the function isn’t prominently displayed in product listings with, say, a “Buy for Me” or an “Auto-Buy” button.

“I’m not sure how many people will actually discover this ability to automatically buy things for you,” he said. “It’s a real use case for shoppers, but the way it’s implemented in Rufus right now feels like more of a minimum viable feature.” He added that, as Amazon integrates more actionable capabilities into Rufus — and as consumers grow accustomed to chatting with it — the feature will likely become more visible and intuitive over time.

Amazon’s new Auto Buy feature arrives at a time when the company says Rufus is gaining traction. During its latest quarterly earnings call, Amazon said 250 million customers have used Rufus this year, with monthly users up 140% year over year. Customers using Rufus are also 60% more likely to complete a purchase. Amazon told investors Rufus is on track to deliver more than $10 billion in incremental annualized sales.

Rufus “is continuing to get better and better and used more broadly,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on the call. “We’re very excited about, in the long term, the prospect of agentic commerce. It has a chance to be good for customers, and it has a chance to be really good for e-commerce.”

AI is expected to play a bigger role in holiday shopping this year, with online spending projected to total $253.4 billion, according to forecasts from Adobe Analytics. Cyber Monday is expected to be the biggest shopping day, at $14.2 billion, followed by Black Friday, at $11.7 billion. More than half of U.S. consumers use AI for conducting shopping research, according to an August Adobe survey.

Retailers and tech giants are racing to reimagine the online shopping experience through artificial intelligence. Companies like Amazon are betting that artificial intelligence will upend traditional online shopping by letting shoppers describe what they want in natural language, refine results through conversation and even hand off parts of the decision-making process to an automated assistant.

OpenAI, for instance, recently inked buzzy deals with major retailers including Etsy, Walmart and Shopify, allowing shoppers to buy goods directly inside ChatGPT. The move puts ChatGPT in more direct competition with Amazon, which remains the first stop for most U.S. online shoppers.

Amazon, for its part, hasn’t publicly announced any partnerships with outside firms to facilitate AI-powered shopping on its site. Instead, it has been laser-focused on beefing up its existing Rolodex of AI tools, including Rufus. In October, Amazon also announced it was introducing a new AI-powered tool called “Help Me Decide” that recommends an item when shoppers are between options.

As Modern Retail previously reported, AI is also beginning to play a larger role in how brands approach advertising on Amazon. Sellers are adding more conversational language to their product listings to try and improve their chances of showing up in shopping assistants like Rufus.

Amazon’s new price alert feature potentially “rewards sellers who take the time to optimize their listings for natural language and AI-driven search,” according to BellaVix’s Haire. “Brands that win will be the ones that understand how to communicate effectively with Amazon’s AI systems.”

What I’m reading

• Many brands are pulling back on Black Friday discounts as tariffs raise the cost of goods, per Bloomberg.
• Brands are dressing up their holiday collections and gift sets in gold packaging, a shade consumers often favor in uncertain economic times, according to The New York Times.
• TikTok Shop has been one of the fastest-growing brands this year, according to a new Morning Consult report cited by Business Insider.

What we’ve covered

• TikTok Shop outlines its safety playbook for Black Friday and Cyber Monday
• Job cuts hit 22-year October high as retail layoffs from Amazon to Target mount ahead of holidays
• SNAP cuts or delays are bad news for Walmart and other retailers