INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Have you ever purchased something using just your voice with an Amazon Echo and the Alexa voice assistant If the answer to that question is
Information that states that, despite the 50 million estimated Alexa-enabled devices out in the wild, "only about 2% of the people with
devices [] have made a purchase with their voices so far in 2018".The numbers come from a pair of insiders who have been briefed on Amazon's
internal figures, which we've run through in more detail below.Silent salesIf true, that's a far smaller number of voice-activated
shoppers than previous third party reports have estimated
Of those that did make a purchase, around 90% were said to have never tried it again
A more healthy 20% did however make use of shopping-related requests of Alexa, such as to ask about current deals or to track the status of
answer questions, playback media, set timers and reminders and more.So what could be holding Amazon's potentially-lucrative Alexa sales
back As far as product comparison goes (which Amazon's website does very well), audio-only feedback on an item isn't as reassuring as
seeing a product on a screen in front of you
That's before the ability to scan user reviews comes into the equation or, more pertinently perhaps, the ability to compare prices with
shops outside of the Amazon ecosystem
unproven shopping medium rather than your phone.
