I read a couple of articles and click bait about no one buying anything on Alexa. There are two points to this - one tactical and causal - shopping requires seeing items, comparing and searching - none of those are suited well to do via voice especially without a display. Second is fundamentally a wrong reading of Amazon. Naive strategic thinkers would want to think slightly bigger picture that everything Amazon does is related to e-commerce and allude to the wisdom that any product or service Amazon launches would be towards making people buy more on Amazon. At some level it is true - but that would be missing forest for the trees. Amazon has been attempting to own a platform for a while now. It was late to the Android game, still owns a mindshare and a share of wallet among Amazon customers in selling Kindle Fire. Then it attempted an entry into phone space really so late in the game, and with an offering so poor that it was DOA. However, what is interesting is the way they tried to enter the space - they built up the Amazon App Store a year before they had launched any device. At that point people thought, oh Amazon wants to sell apps, just like other things Amazon sells - missing the point that Amazon was building up the app store , and attracting developers in order to have it ready by the time it introduced the devices, which was a smart move. A part of me thinks, Amazon didn't realize the potential of voice assistants or the exact trajectory or the use cases that would evolve when Alexa was launched. However by launching early, it owned the space just like how it owned the Ebook/Ebook reader category. I completely agree with this article, that Amazon is owning this new platform/operating system around which a whole new ecosystem is going to be built (has been building): When Alexa was launched I said, this is a voice search engine and a music player, what I completely missed was the IoT integration. But not once did I think that Alexa was going to revolutionize shopping.