It seems that Amazon Echo Alexa’s instant voice ordering and reordering is broken. One of the biggest advantages of Amazon’s Echo and its digital assistant, Alexa, is the ability to tell Alexa to reorder something for you, and to have it instantly reordered using Amazon’s “one click” system.
The no-muss, no-fuss way that it should work, and has worked, is that you say something like “Alexa, reorder cat litter”, and Alexa and the Amazon Echo system will search your previous order history, find the cat litter you last ordered, confirm that it’s what you want to order, and that’s it. The cat litter magically appears on your doorstep one to two days later.
However, today Alexa apparently went on strike, and will only put things that you order or reorder through your Echo device into your Amazon shopping cart, where you have to review and finalize the order. This means that you either have to go through the frustrating and auditorally tedious process of having to listen to Alexa read off whatever is in your cart, and then confirming it, or going to your computer to finalize your purchase, in which case why the heck did you use the Echo in the first place?
This kind of defeats the whole convenience of using your Echo for ordering from Amazon, which may lead to a decrease in Amazon orders (let’s face it, a large part of Amazon’s dominance relies on how (too) easy they make it for you to give them your money). So we predict that this is not an intentional change, but rather that someone at Amazon accidentally flipped the devices’ one-click ordering setting to ‘off’.
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On the other hand, this may be a great time to take advantage of the fact that other real live, in-person, brick and mortar stores (remember them?) like Target will Match Amazon prices right at the store.
Given that this is happening on Mother’s Day, who knows, perhaps Alexa is a mother (we’re pretty sure many people today are calling her some variation of ‘mother’).
We wrote some time ago about how Amazon was programming Alexa to detect your moods; if they have really honed this skill, we’re predicting that Alexa will be detecting quite a bit of mood until Amazon gets this fixed.
Has this happened to you? Have you tried to voice order or voice reorder something through your Amazon Echo only to find that it’s requiring you to review your cart instead of just sending you the darned thing? If so, let us know, so we can figure out how wide-spread this is, and how it is impacting Amazon’s customers.
The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported. Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP.