The initial problem was that Alexa shopping customers who already knew exactly what they wanted with high confidence queries like, “Reorder shampoo” or “Buy Downy paper towels 4-pack” were still having to tap through search results to get to the purchase buttons.
To reduce this friction, I designed and launched a new search experience on all Echo Show Devices for a customer that knows, with some degree of certainty, what item they’re looking for. Alexa has high confidence that the product she recommends will suit the customer’s needs, and surfaces purchase buttons in the initial offer presentation. This saves both the customer time and increased our checkout conversion rates.
In order to determine whether a search is high or low confidence I evaluated the following set of signals with my product & engineering partners to understand whether Alexa can provide a confident recommendation. We categorized signals into two buckets: explicit and implicit.
For low confidence searches, the original search experience (image below) is used since Alexa cannot provide a confident recommendation and will either 1) elicit more information from the customer, or 2) provide a broad response.
The experiment was successful with purchase rate observing a statistically significant improvement of +655bps. This feature launched in January 2023.
