This Omni Talk Retail Fast Five segment explores Amazon's new Alexa Shopping feature that gives customers access to up to 365 days of product price history.

Chris Walton and Ben Miller discuss how greater price transparency could strengthen consumer trust, why the feature supports the rise of agentic commerce, and how Amazon continues to position Alexa as the future interface for AI-powered shopping. They also explore how this capability could eventually help AI agents make even better purchasing decisions.

Tune in for the full episode here: https://youtu.be/-pwAnA4c7Co

Amazon is expanding its Alexa for Shopping agentic assistant to show customers up to 30, 90 and 365 days of price history on any product, letting shoppers or Amazon's own AI verify whether a deal is actually a deal before buying.

According to ChainStorage, customers can access price history two ways.

One, by clicking a link right next to the price on a product page or two, by asking Alexa for shopping directly.

Something like is this the lowest price recently?

Wow.

Price history is live for all US, UK, Canadian and Indian customers as of today.

The full365 debut is rolling out in the US, UK and India over the coming weeks.

Ben, does giving customers a full year of price history help Amazon look more trustworthy?

Or going back to the conversation that we just had to some degree, does it invite more price scrutiny than Amazon wants?

Yeah Chris, that was my first reflection on this one.

It's funny this is coming after the last one because there's a retail reality, isn't it?

Prices move, that's what happens.

Look for Amazon, I think it's a strong move.

I think it's a strong move for a number of things.

It keeps building their credentials as a trusted price leader.

So price transparency is great and it especially sets them up for a gentic commerce.

Price transparency, that's a, that's a big, big building block to get place.

There's a really significant direction of travel for Amazon sellers here.

And this is Amazon's continued investment in Alexa for Shopping?

Yeah, Alexa for Shopping continues to look like it will be the default way to navigate Amazon at some point in the future.

So I think that's for me that's got huge read throughs and for Amazon sellers and brands really understanding how your product is discovered and how it shows up on Alexa for shopping is critical and how your AMS investment influences that.

So that's one of my big takeaways from this.

It's also important for Amazon sales to recognize there's even extended price visibility.

Now they've been working with price visibility for a while.

A year of priceability that brings in new categories, new seasonal products where the shorter time spans that it might have been of less relevant.

So also sellers, I think it's really key but no, I think it's a good move.

But Chris, I'd love to hear your views on this one.

Yeah, I mean I, I'm not super worried about the fallout from this, like the PR fallout from this because I think anytime you're showing consumers how to save money, I think it's kind of bulletproof you know, at the end of the day, you know, like, you're just saying, like, hey, here's the price and here's what it was before.

I think consumers are generally going to be receptive to having that information because it helps them to save money.

So for that reason alone, I like the move from Amazon.

The other thing too, Ben, and you touched on this a little bit.

I like, I love it for the optionality it creates just as an experiment.

So I think it's like a really good experiment to see what happens when you put it out there for your customer base, because, one, you can see how consumers react to it.

But two, and you said this, you alluded to it.

But to give it even more context, like, it gives the scraping agents, you know, all the LLMs that are scraping data from sites.

It gives them more info to help their users make informed decisions, which ultimately Amazon wants because they want to capture whatever product search traffic is out there by giving them the most information on whether something's a good deal.

So, and then the last point, the third point I'd make in terms of the optionality is it also sets the table for incorporating similar enhancements into Amazon's Buy for me technology.

Right?

Like, okay, yeah, can I, can I start to track this on other people's websites too and incorporate that into it?

And maybe, maybe Amazon's like, let's understand if people are using it on our own site first before we go and invest on figuring out how to get it from other sites as well and what can we take and what's going to be involved in that.

So all of that just puts, it just gets me thinking, like, Amazon, more than more and more, Amazon's going to come out of this wave of AI, you know, just fine and dandy, you know, based on how they're, you know, the actions they're taking to bolster their ranks in terms of how people are actually going to shop.

It feels like the most clear strategy to me in the industry in terms of how they're thinking about, you know, keeping hold of their.

Of, of their commerce, you know, kingdom or domain, so to speak.

Yeah, I, I agree.

I think anybody selling significant volumes online should really stay close to Alexa for shopping and how it's developing.