In February 2019, we published a blog titled, “The state of voice commerce.” At the time, Amazon had sold over 100 million Alexa devices. While both Microsoft and Google had voice assistant devices on the market and Siri was available on Apple iPhones, only Alexa had the technology capabilities to complete a purchase. Because of this, along with the fact that no technical definition existed for voice commerce, the writer offered a broad definition: Voice commerce“ is a scenario in which using a voice service is part of the shopping process.”
Fast forward to today — five years, 400 million more Alexas and a lot of technology advancements later — it was high time to take another look at voice commerce with a current picture of what it looks like today and where it's headed.
What is voice commerce?
Voice commerce is a type of commerce enabled by voice assistant devices that use voice recognition technology to enable consumers to launch and complete a shopping journey. Instead of having to look at a screen, type in a request, and scroll and click repeatedly, it enables you to use verbal commands to initiate an audible conversation with a virtual assistant who guides you through the discovery and purchase process.
It’s important to note that voice commerce is a subset of conversational commerce. While the two terms are often used interchangeably, they shouldn’t be. Conversational commerce encompasses any communication channel that enables a two-way conversation, including text-based messaging and chatbots, while voice commerce is triggered by audible commands.
When you're talking about voice commerce, all you're really talking about is digital commerce with natural language processing from voice to text. It starts with taking your voice, translating it to text, running that through natural language processing and then running the outputs through digital commerce.
DIRECTOR OF PORTFOLIO STRATEGY, COMMERCETOOLS
The growth of voice commerce
In a May 2023 press release, Amazon announced that over 500 million Alexas had been sold since launching its voice assistant device to the general public in June 2015. The release quoted Rohit Prasad, Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, “People don't realize that a lot of shopping happens through Alexa. Shopping attractions are growing 40% year-over-year, and more than 50% of our customers have used Alexa for a shopping attraction.”
While initially, you could only buy products from Amazon on Alexa, today, you can search for products, place orders and make payments from brands including Walmart, Best Buy, 1-800-FLOWERS and Starbucks. Granted, you have to have an online account with the retailer and link it to Alexa, but after that, it’s easy. Alexa is also connected with major brands such as REI Co-op, Redbox and eBags. You can’t make purchases (yet) but Alexa can give you the scoop on the daily deals offered by these brands as well as check on order status.
Google Assistant and Siri are catching up with Amazon. Both allow you to complete peer-to-peer payments (I asked Siri to send my husband $10 and it happily did so after asking me which account to use). Siri can also purchase products for you at the Apple store. If you enable the Walmart action (Amazon calls them “skills”) on your Google Assistant, you can use your voice to buy anything in the store.
Of course, most people are aware that many automakers including BMW, Audi and Volkswagen have enabled voice commerce in their connected car experiences. Today, customers can buy add-on services as well as products right from their dashboard as well as connect to their Alexa or Google Assistant to gain access to additional shopping capabilities.
All of these advancements are incrementally supporting the growth of voice commerce. According to Statista, total purchases globally made using voice assistants increased from $4.6 billion in 2021 to nearly $20 billion in 2023 — which translates to nearly 400% growth in two years.
Current Capital One Shopping Research offers even more compelling statistics:
8.4 billion: Number of active voice assistant devices worldwide in 2024
49%: of US consumers use voice search for shopping
60%: of online consumers in the US have bought products using a smart home voice-assisted device
The next step for voice commerce
It’s abundantly clear that consumers are ready and willing to use this technology, reinforcing that it’s time for businesses to leverage voice commerce. And, it appears that this is what’s happening now. More brands are implementing strategies such as enabling voice-enabled search on their websites, developing voice apps for Alexa, Google and Siri, and optimizing content to improve voice results.
Cencosud, one of the largest retailers in Latin America and a commercetools customer, has tapped into the power of Amazon Rufus, an AI conversational shopping assistant, to guide its customers along the discovery process. The company prepared for the launch by fine-tuning its product data, categorizing product reviews and adding content such as a fit guide.
Let's say, I want to buy a new coffee machine. I start by asking Rufus, ‘Tell me the difference between a drip coffee maker and a pour-over coffee maker.’ Rufus will give me a detailed side-by-side comparison of these two categories. Once I’ve chosen a drip coffee machine, I may ask, ’What are the key features I should look for?’ Rufus will give me several different features. I can further refine the recommendations by asking, ‘Show me ones that are easy to clean’. Rufus will filter down to the ones that are easy to clean. When I’m down to a specific product, I can ask specific questions: ‘Does this product come with free filters?’ So, you can see how this is a really powerful way of engaging the shopper in their product discovery journey.
STRATEGY DIRECTOR, CENCOSUD
How AI is powering voice commerce growth
The technology behind voice commerce relies on natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to understand and interpret user commands or queries. Whether you’re asking for product recommendations, checking the weather or placing an order, these devices are programmed to understand context and intent, making the shopping experience seamless and intuitive.
As we’ve all experienced, voice assistants don’t always understand what you’re saying. However, there have been dramatic improvements in AI just in the past year and it’s now getting to the point where it can pick up the nuances of your vocal intonations and understand them, no matter who you are.
For example, Marc Stracuzza, Director of Portfolio Strategy at commercetools, pointed to a DEI presentation at GoogleNext 2024 featuring Dimitri Kanevsky, the deaf research scientist at Google who built the company’s voice-to-text suite. He explained that Dimitri doesn’t have what would be considered “normal speech patterns” and yet Google’s speech recognition can understand 90% of what Dimitri says.
The new generative AI models are light years ahead of where they were. So, we're going to see a lot more voice interactions because it's so much better at just understanding how we talk and translating that into actionable content. This is where commerce is going, because it's enabling more people to use digital commerce. Because if you have limited accessibility through vision or vocal impairments or whatever, it'll work for you.
DIRECTOR OF PORTFOLIO STRATEGY, COMMERCETOOLS
How composable commerce makes embracing voice commerce easy
The best part of all of this, at least for businesses, is that it is fairly simple to get started with voice commerce if you have modern commerce technology in place.
Marc explained that this is why commercetools Composable Commerce is so well suited for voice commerce. “With conversational commerce, you're sitting your AI on top of your data set. It has to be able to interact with your data, and this is why it's so important to have easy access to your data. Otherwise, it can’t deliver what they're searching for.”
At the end of the day, what AI and therefore conversational commerce needs, is access to well-structured commerce data. And, we [commercetools] are a well-structured commerce data platform that provides very easy access through our APIs. So, the story for commercetools is that it doesn’t matter what channel, application or you need to access — it's all the same to us. This is kind of the beauty of our product:We don't care what you're building, we'll enable it and we'll enable it well because that's what we're built it for.
DIRECTOR OF PORTFOLIO STRATEGY, COMMERCETOOLS
Contact one of our composable commerce experts to learn more about how commercetools can help you embrace Voice Commerce and future-proof your business.
Anita J. Temple is the Corporate Journalist at commercetools. She was a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and W Magazine before launching a career as a freelance writer and creative producer. She has written content and worked on a wide range of marketing projects for companies including Dreamworks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Adidas.