Why Everyone Thought We’d Shop by Voice (and Why It Never Happened)
Remember how contactless shopping was promised to be the next big thing? In 2017, the Echo Dot became Amazon’s best-selling product during the Prime Day sale, surpassing the Nintendo Switch and Instant Pot. Amazon’s goal, in part, was to significantly lower the price of the device to get its Alexa voice assistant into as many homes as possible—likely hoping to capitalize on the voice commerce revolution, which industry analysts predicted would reach over $40 billion by 2022. But something went wrong.
Despite Amazon’s complete dominance of the home voice assistant market, by 2022, Alexa had been called a “colossal failure,” 10,000 people had been laid off from Amazon, and the company reportedly lost billions of dollars in a single year . While voice shopping has grown slowly but steadily since its inception, it has never lived up to the expectations of the late 2010s, making it a fascinating story of how technology predictions prove wrong.
Shopping by voice is no fun.
So what’s gone wrong with voice shopping? I asked Jacqueline Burney, president of marketing firm VI Branding, why she thinks people aren’t shopping by voice as often as expected, and her answer was simple: it’s not enjoyable. “I think people enjoy shopping… and voice shopping takes away that dopamine rush,” Burney said. “We want to remove obstacles from our lives. But shopping isn’t an obstacle.”
Shopping through Alexa and similar devices eliminates one of the most dopamine-inducing aspects of shopping: you can’t see the product before you buy it. This doesn’t matter if you’re reordering dog food, but for certain types of purchases, it’s detrimental. Here’s how Jason Goldberg, then senior vice president of commerce and content at Razorfish , described the likelihood of people buying clothes using Alexa or similar devices in a 2018 interview : “Especially for first-time purchases with complex specifications like size and color, people will never want to buy anything by voice.”
Shopping by voice is no easier.
While shopping can be fun, it’s often inconvenient, and voice shopping doesn’t eliminate the “inconvenience factor” of online shopping; in fact, it exacerbates it. In marketing circles, reducing consumers’ ” cognitive load ” is seen as key to increasing sales—if you make the shopping process faster and easier, people are likely to buy more. In terms of physical effort, voice shopping is easier than shopping on a web page—you can do it while doing something else—but the mental effort, or cognitive load, is higher. “In practice, [voice shopping] can feel like extra work because you’re waiting for an assistant to tell you about things you could instantly look up on a screen or in a store,” Bernie said.
Making purchases by voice is not so safe.
Voice-activated shopping isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a potential security risk. While it’s possible to securely protect your password or PIN on a shopping platform, having to recite all those numbers is annoying, especially if others can hear you. Many people haven’t bothered, and children have started using Alexa to order dollhouses and cookies , mischievous parrots have ordered grapes, and a late-night talk show host has ordered pancake mix for his audience. Ultimately, consumers don’t trust the security of voice shopping: 45% of respondents in a recent PWC study stated, “I don’t trust the voice assistant and don’t feel comfortable making payments through it.”
Where did all those Echo Dots go?
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that industry analysts trusted voice shopping enough to confidently predict sales would exceed $40 billion by 2022. It’s even harder to believe that Amazon risked billions investing in a product inferior to the company’s existing commerce platform. To be fair, despite a rocky start, Amazon’s Alexa devices have proven very popular—the company has sold millions of them, and “Alexa” has become a household name—but most consumers don’t use them for shopping. Amazon may have intended Alexa to be a home shopping kiosk, but consumers want a jukebox: most people use smart speakers to play music . It was nice, though, that Amazon subsidized the cost of alarm clock radios for millions of its customers.
Where is contactless shopping now?
While it may not have generated the excitement predicted, voice-activated shopping has achieved modest success among consumers. According to a consumer market research study conducted in October 2025 , 43% of voice-activated device owners use their devices for shopping, but only when including actions like “researching products” and “tracking packages.” Only 22% of smart speaker users actually make purchases using their smart devices, and these purchases tend to be for household items like paper towels, cleaning products, and batteries.
What was the mistake of industry analysts?
It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of widespread misunderstanding in any given industry, but the voice shopping bubble was at least partly fueled by misunderstanding. In a 2014 interview with Fast Company, Andrew Ng , chief scientist at Chinese search engine Baidu, said, “In five years, at least 50% of all searches will be either image-based or speech-based.” This oft- repeated statistic seemed to point to the inevitable dominance of voice search in the market, but Ng was speaking specifically about people in China using a specific search engine, not about all internet users everywhere.
Over time, context-specific forecasts became accepted as conventional wisdom, and by 2017, confident predictions emerged that $40 billion would be spent on voice-activated shopping by 2022 , and that voice input would naturally translate into purchasing behavior. This influenced corporate decisions, such as Amazon’s attempt to capture the market with Alexa. But as the bubble burst, the smart speaker emerged as its true form: a radio that could also be used to reorder paper towels—a useful but limited tool, not a revolutionary invention.