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Start free — claim $15/mo flat →Alexa+ has been live in the UK since March, but the part that matters for sellers only becomes clear once you look at what changed three weeks before it. On July 20, Amazon removed the Buy Box performance eligibility bar for its UK and EU marketplaces — the change that let unauthorised sellers compete for the Buy Box without building performance history first. Now the same region has an AI assistant that reads reviews, tracks prices, and can place an order on a shopper’s behalf, straight from Amazon.co.uk. Neither change was announced as connected to the other. That’s exactly why it’s worth connecting them yourself.
According to About Amazon UK, Alexa+ launched in the UK on March 19, 2026 — the first market outside North America to get it — and it’s currently in Early Access. During Early Access, the assistant is free for every customer signed into their account, Prime or not, through at least September 15, 2026. After that, it settles into the pricing model already familiar in the US: £19.99 a month for non-Prime customers, free as a Prime benefit for everyone else.
Access works two ways: buy one of the new Alexa+-built devices (Echo Show 8, Echo Show 11, Echo Dot Max, Echo Studio), or sign up at amazon.co.uk/newalexa if you already own an eligible Echo. Either way, the shopping layer is switched on by default — not an opt-in add-on.
This is the same underlying assistant SentryKit covered when it replaced Rufus in the US — Alexa for Shopping, extended into a new market with the full feature set intact. Per Amazon’s own rollout details, it can find products from Amazon.co.uk and refine results conversationally, answer questions pulled from customer reviews and product pages, track 30-, 90-, and 365-day price history on items a shopper is watching, set target-price alerts — and, the part that raises the stakes, place the order automatically the moment the price hits that target.
It also uses order history. Ask Alexa+ to reorder something and it searches past purchases and offers them up before you’ve typed a product name. That’s a meaningfully different shopping motion than typing a search term into Amazon.co.uk and scrolling results — the assistant is building the shortlist before the shopper ever sees a search page.
Auto-buy already changed the risk calculus once when it rolled out in the US — an assistant that purchases automatically doesn’t check whether the listing it’s buying from is the brand’s authorised offer or a hijacker’s. It buys whichever offer is sitting in the Buy Box the second the price condition is met.
The UK is now getting that same mechanic on top of a Buy Box that got easier to win without a performance track record just three weeks earlier. Before July 20, an unauthorised seller undercutting your price on a UK listing had to build up performance history before seriously competing for the Buy Box — a natural delay. That delay is gone. A private label seller shipping into the UK described exactly this pattern after the eligibility change: a new seller appears on the listing, undercuts price, and instead of taking weeks to build enough history to compete seriously, starts pulling meaningful Buy Box share within days. Add an assistant that auto-buys the moment a price condition is met, and the seller sitting in the Buy Box when that trigger fires can be a hijacker with no track record at all — not because Alexa+ did anything wrong, but because the two changes stack.
None of this requires new tooling to check. It requires checking the right thing at the right time.
Start with your UK ASINs’ “Other Sellers on Amazon” section. A new, unfamiliar seller appearing there matters more now than it did before July 20, because they no longer need to wait to compete seriously for the Buy Box. Next, look at your review volume and quality — Alexa+ answers shopper questions straight from your reviews, so thin or dated review sections show up as thin, dated answers. Finally, check your pricing consistency. Target-price tracking rewards listings with a stable, predictable price history; erratic pricing gives the assistant less to lock onto and gives a repricing hijacker more room to look like the better option.
A Hijacker Detected alert catches the first part in real time instead of during a weekly check, and a Buy Box Lost alert tells you the moment a hijacker actually takes the ranking on a UK listing — not after a week of orders you can’t explain. If you’re not watching your UK and EU listings this closely, see what SentryKit’s pricing looks like.
During Early Access, yes — free for every customer signed into their account through at least September 15, 2026. After Early Access ends, it’s £19.99 a month for non-Prime members and free for Prime members.
It can find and compare products from Amazon.co.uk, answer questions using customer reviews, track price history, set target-price alerts with automatic purchase, and pull from order history to speed up reordering.
Yes, indirectly but concretely — it changes how a shopper reaches a listing, through an assistant’s recommendation and reviews-based answers rather than a manual search, and it can complete a purchase automatically from whichever offer is sitting in the Buy Box at that moment.
The eligibility bar that used to slow down new, unauthorised sellers competing for the Buy Box was removed on July 20, 2026 — about three weeks before Alexa+’s auto-buy shopping engine reached full visibility in the UK market. A hijacker no longer needs a performance track record to be the offer Alexa+ ends up buying from.
Alexa+ didn’t launch with a warning label for sellers, and it doesn’t need one — the shopping engine works exactly as designed. What changed is what’s sitting behind your Buy Box when it does.
Nisha Shetty · Marketing Manager, SentryKit
Nisha is a marketing manager and former Amazon seller who writes about e-commerce growth, consumer behavior, and digital retail trends.
