Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Congratulates Best Buy on Alexa Skill Integration, Say What?
Founder and CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos this afternoon congratulated the Best Buy team on their new Alexa skill.
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The new Alexa skill from Best Buy allows shoppers to use Alexa powered smart speakers and devices to shop for Best Buy Deal of the Day products, TVs, and other limited electronics categories.
To shop Best Buy on Alexa, a customer enables the Best Buy skill on Alexa, logs into their Best Buy account via the assistant, and then says. “Alexa, talk to Best Buy.”
Best Buy spokeswoman Carly Charlson said her company is looking into adding more product categories to its Alexa skill in the future. “We’re exploring, we’re just getting started,” she said.
There are thousands of Alexa skills, many from major brand names and Bezos or Amazon rarely made any mention of them. So what makes this one special?
Amazon.com has a pretty stout selection of consumer products on their platform. One has to wonder why Best Buy would choose to join the platform of a retailer against it spends so much time competing.
Best Buy is one of the few physical store retailers that has managed to bridge the divide between physical store and eCommerce. Customers that live within driving distance of a Best Buy store can easily shop online and pick up most orders within one hour.
The company also offers many products not found in stores and has often promoted free 2-day shipping within the United States. And the Best Buy online stores feature a significant number of third-party marketplace sellers.
So, back to the question, why did Jeff Bezos announce this new Alexa skill on his twitter account? With no press release or other media information, we can only speculate.
- Best Buy already has Amazon product displays in their stores. Might Amazon use the extensive network of Best Buy stores to fulfill orders for Amazon devices by giving customers a choice to pick them up locally?
- Amazon forged a test relationship with Kohl’s for returns in select markets. Might Amazon consider using Best Buy stores as return centers?
- Is Amazon considering to acquire Best Buy? With a market cap of 17.16 billion, that seems highly unlikely.
- Jeff Bezos is just needling the retail industry. Not typically his style, but anything is possible.
What do you think is going on here? It just strikes us as curious that Bezos would tweet an Alexa skill integration for the fun of it. Drop us a line in the comments section below.
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Richard Meldner
Richard is co-founder of eSeller365. He has over 17 years of experience on eBay which includes tens of thousands of sales to buyers in over 100 countries and even has experience with eBay’s VeRO program enforcing intellectual property rights for a former employer. And for about two years Richard sold products on Amazon using Amazon FBA in the US.
To “relax” from the daily business grind, for a few weekends a year, he also works for IMSA as a professional race official.