Amazon has launched Alexa for Shopping in the UK, six months after it went live in the US. The AI shopping assistant is free for any signed-in customer on the Amazon Shopping app and website, and doesn’t need Prime or an Echo device.

It combines the product knowledge behind Rufus with the personal context from Alexa+. When it launched in the US in May, Amazon retired Rufus as a standalone chatbot and folded it into the new assistant.

The full Alexa+ assistant has been available in the UK through Early Access since March.

In the app, Alexa for Shopping sits behind an Alexa icon in the bottom navigation bar. On desktop, it’s at the top of the screen.

It puts AI-generated overviews at the top of search results and on product pages, summing up a category and what to look out for.

Shoppers can also line products up side by side on features, price and review highlights, and check price history over 30, 60 or 365 days. The year-long price history carries over from Rufus, which went from 90 days to a full year in May.

It handles the basket too. Shoppers can add regular items from past orders, check out with one tap, look for deals, track orders and start returns.

Recommendations are personalised using a customer’s preferences, shopping history and conversations, including those with Alexa+ on Echo devices. Customers can view, edit or delete what it knows about them, such as family members, pets or dietary needs.

For brands and sellers, shoppers now see a shortlist the assistant has picked ahead of the standard results page. Product data, reviews, imagery, stock and delivery information all feed into what it recommends. Amazon decides which products get compared and how the answer is framed.

Amazon wants that shopping to happen through its own assistant. In September it blocked Meta’s Muse AI agent from shopping on its site, after earlier moves against agents from Perplexity, Google and OpenAI.

Amazon says more than 400 million customers worldwide have used its AI shopping assistance in the past 12 months. It hasn’t shared any UK usage or conversion figures.

Price alerts, price drop alerts and scheduled actions, such as an automatic monthly restock, are due next. Amazon hasn’t given a date for any of them.