Despite Amazon's complete domination of the home-voice-thing market, by 2022, Alexa was being called a "colossal failure," 10,000 people were laid off from Amazon, and the company reportedly lost billions in a year. While shopping by voice has grown slowly and steadily since its birth, it never lived up to the hype bubble of the late teens, and it's a fascinating story about how tech predictions go wrong.
Shopping via Alexa and its pals makes one of the most dopamine-friendly aspects of shopping impossible: you can't see the thing before you buy it. That doesn't matter if you're re-ordering dog food, but it's death for some kinds of shopping. Here's how Jason Goldberg, then SVP of commerce and content at Razorfish, described the likelihood of people shopping for clothing using Alexa or similar devices in a 2018 interview: "Especially for first-time purchases with complicated attributes like size and color, people are never going to want to buy something via voice."
It's not easier to shop with your voice
Shopping with your voice is more than just a pain, it's a potential security threat. Keeping your password or PIN secure on a shopping platform is possible, but saying all those numbers is annoying, especially if other people can hear you. So many people didn't bother, and children started using Alexa to order dollhouses and cookies, mischievous parrots ordered grapes, and a late-night talk show host ordered pancake mix for the people watching their show. Ultimately, consumers don't trust the security aspects of voice shopping: 45% of respondents in a recent study done by PWC said “I don't trust or feel comfortable sending payment through my voice assistant.”
What happened to all those Echo Dots?
It might not have blown up as predicted, but voice-powered shopping has made modest inroads with consumers. According to consumer research from October, 2025, 43% of voice-enabled device owners use their devices to shop, but only if you include things like "researching products" and "tracking packages" as shopping. Only 22% of smart-speaker users actually make purchases with their smart devices, and those purchases tend to be household goods like paper towels, cleaning supplies, and batteries.
Where did industry analysts go wrong?
Over time, a context-specific prediction began to be seen as conventional wisdom, and by 2017, you had confident predictions that $40 billion would be spent on voice shopping by 2022, and that voice input would naturally translate into buying behavior. That shaped corporate decisions like Amazon effort to corner the market with Alexa. But as the bubble deflated, the smart speaker found its true form: a radio that you can also use to re-order paper towels, a useful but limited tool instead of a paradigm-shifting disruption.
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