Why Everyone Thought We'd Be Shopping by Voice (and Why That Never Actually Happened)
Remember when hands-free shopping was going to be the next big thing? In 2017, the Echo Dot was the single best-selling item on Amazon during its Prime Day sale, outselling both the Nintendo Switch and Instant Pot. Amazon's goal was partly to heavily discount the device in order to install its voice assistant, Alexa, in as many homes as possible—likely in hopes to capitalize on the voice commerce revolution that industry analysts predicted would be worth over $40 billion by 2022. But something went awry.
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.
It's not fun to shop with your voice
So what went wrong with voice shopping? I asked Jacquelyn Berney, the president of tech marketing firm VI Branding, why she thought people aren't shopping by voice as much as predicted, and her answer was simple: it's not fun. "My belief is that people like shopping ... and voice shopping takes away that dopamine hit," Berney said. "We want to remove friction in our lives. But shopping is not friction."
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
While shopping can be fun, it's also often a pain, and shopping by voice doesn't alleviate the "hassle factor" of making purchases online—it adds to it. In marketing circles, reducing consumers' "cognitive load" is seen as a key to driving sales—if you make it faster and easier for people to shop, they'll probably shop more. Strictly in terms of physical effort, shopping by voice is easier than shopping from a webpage—you can do it while you're doing something else—but the mental effort, the cognitive load, is greater. "In practice, [voice shopping] can feel like more work because you’re waiting for the assistant to talk you through things you could skim instantly on a screen or in a store," Berney said.
It's not as secure 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?
In retrospect it's hard to believe industry analysts would put enough faith in shopping with your voice to confidently predict sales would surpass $40 billion by 2022. It's harder to believe that Amazon would risk billions on a product that was inferior to the shopping platform that the company had already built. To be fair, despite a rocky start, Amazon's Alexa devices proved very popular—the company has sold millions of them and "Alexa" is a household name—but most consumers don't use them to shop. Amazon may have envisioned Alexa as a home shopping kiosk, but consumers want a jukebox: most people use smart speakers to play music. It was nice of Amazon to subsidize the cost of millions of customers' clock radios, though.
Where hands-free shopping is now
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?
It's impossible to tell exactly what causes a general missing of the mark in an industry, but the voice shopping bubble was at least partially inflated by a misunderstanding. In a 2014 interview with Fast Company, Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Chinese search engine Baidu, said, "In five years time at least 50% of all searches are going to be either through images or speech." This often repeated statistic seemed to point to an inevitable voice dominated market, but Ng was talking specifically about people in China using a specific search engine, not everyone online, everywhere.
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.