Amazon Doubles Down on Rufus PLUS Joins the UCP Alliance - What Does it All Mean?
Amazon introduces 8 new Rufus features and we have a Hot take on what it all means and what they are going to do with UCP, plus live examples of all 8 features.
This Wednesday (April 29th), we have a big first ever situation (in my memory at least). Four of the Magnificent 7 (aka Mag7) are reporting on the same day: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. That means $14T of AI-powered market cap reports their first calendar year earnings in a < 12 hour window - it’s going to be a crazy news week to say the least.
On the Amazon front, I predict in Wednesday’s report we are going to hear a LOT about Rufus because last week not only did they drop a ton of cool new features we will detail, but they also shocked the Agentic Commerce world by joining the UCP alliance!
Let’s start there and then jump into the new features.
UCP Flexes It’s Muscles
On Friday, April 24th at 11:05am (weird right?) Google issued this press release that Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe have joined the UCP Tech Council. Stripe co-created ACP with ChatGPT, so that one hurts and we knew Microsoft already from their announcement and ‘first to launch’ a loyalty (Identity) implementation as covered here at Retailgentic.
Meta is also a bit of a surprise, because we’ve seen evidence they are engaged with ACP (the only company checking in code over there in a long time). Perhaps they are hedging or they tried both and voted with their feet - I suspect we’ll hear something on this one Wed.
The really shocker was Amazon being added to the list. My phone lit up like a Christmas tree - with people asking:
Ok, But What Does Rufus+UCP Even Mean?
All we know is Amazon was on a list, but if you marry this announcement with the features we’re about to go through it shows you a general direction that Amazon is going called.
Embrace, Extend and …..Extinguish?!
When the internet started soaring in popularity, led by the Netscape browser, Microsoft famously developed a strategy to take the internet protocols, embrace them, extend them and then extinguish the challenger companies by ‘out disrupting’ them. I believe Amazon is employing a strategy like this.
Here’s how I see them utilizing this here. First, let’s look at the classic Amazon Third Party marketplace flywheel:
At the heart of the flywheel is the magical world ‘Selection’. Amazonians are well aware that this little diagram is at the heart of Amazon’s growth over the last 20 years and it’s drilled into the training so deeply that anyone on the retail team can replicate this diagram blindfolded with one arm tied behind their back. Selection, selection selection.
Agentic Commerce’s Threat to Amazon: Selection
Up until today, if you wanted to get to the selection that isn’t in Amazon, you would have to visit hundreds to thousands of websites or use the non-transactional Google Shopping which isn’t really a ‘transactional’ threat. ACP and UCP threatens to challenge that. What if you can now find all of the stuff ‘not on Amazon’ in one location. What if the economics are so good, Amazon starts to bleed 3P sellers? That’s a threat worth keeping an eye on and looking the opportunity to embrace and extend to neuter the threat. Here’s a Venn diagram visualization:
If you’re Amazon, this is bad. As pictured, I’ve made it very small. but what if it grew, what is all the selection not in Amazon was in one place that at least checkout-wise was as awesome as Amazon. What if the discovery was a bit better too and didn’t have ads? Hmm, that’s a potential dagger to the heart of the flywheel - not good.
What Embrace and Extend looks like:
Boom! Not only have you addressed the threat (embrace) you’ve actually INCREASED Amazon’s key flywheel component: Selection. Amazon 1P+3P+UCP is « Amazon 1P+3P. How would it work? Here’s how.
Just recently (March 11) , we covered in detail here Amazon’s moves to expand the Shop Direct program to add datafeeds to the crawled solution. At the time it was interesting that there was not real mention of the Buy-For-Me solution. The first save of Agentic Commerce checkouts used ‘browser-based checkouts’ - Perplexity Buy with Pro, Google Buy for Me and Amazon Buy-For-Me. With the exception of Amazon Buy-For-Me have all been replaced by UCP or other non-browser solutions. My prediction is the final step here is Amazon will deprecate or slowly move to the background the Buy-For-Me and we’ll see UCP used to enable transactions in addition to or instead of Buy-For-Me on Shop Direct inventory.
Now you have no reason to shop on Google, for example here’s the “Gemini selection” Venn diagram:
Google Gemini’s inventory is just UCP, no Amazon 1P+3P. By being ‘read only’ with UCP meaning they won’t publish UCP datafeeds but will ‘consume’ the end points they starve competitors of a large percentage. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish - game over. Check and mate.
Amazon’s Flood of New Rufus Features
As a reminder, on Amazon’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Andy Jassy announced that Rufus is now available to 300 million active customers and is already driving roughly $12 billion in down-stream transactions. Days before the UCP announcement, Amazon via a post on the About Amazon / Amazon News blog site, they announced a raft of new features in Rufus. Let’s go through them in detail.
Rufus New Feature (RFN) 1: Scheduled Actions
The best way to see this one is to show you some examples. To get to Scheduled Actions, you press the new little Plus box (popularized by ChatGPT now used by everyone as a UI metaphor) and it only has ‘Scheduled Actions’ (today!).
If you just choose this you get these ‘prompt pill’ pre-canned suggestions:
My first line of thought - this is going to be great to get a jump on in-stock alerts! Well, turns out Amazon will only run a scheduled action once a day:
One nit-pick, if you’re only checking once a day at, say 6am or midnight or whatever, then you aren’t going to be letting me know ‘immediately’.
I then thought, what about price lowerings, there’s already a price tracker feature, but you can now use Scheduled Actions to set price alerts:
Finally, I had it set an alert for my Veggiedent’s to be on sale at their lowest price and an overall weekly deal tracker. Now when I say “show me my current actions” Rufus will help me manage my list:
When the alert fires, I get an email like this:
RNF2: Rufus Persistent Account Memory
If you’ve watched my Rufus videos, i’ve always find it kind of mind boggling that Rufus didn’t have access to my oder history. Amazon has fixed that, now Rufus is faster at finding an order than your order history. Let’s say I can’t remember exactly what I ordered, Rufus finds it instantly with natural language, no need to remember the specifics:
RNF3: Personalized Deals
Rufus also now has access to your wish list and Amazon browsing history in addition to your past orders. These feed into what they are calling Personalized Deals. You can ask Rufus some prompts like: What are the best deals for me? or even more specifically, “Are any items on my wishlist on sale?”
RNF4: Custom Shopping Guides
You can use Rufus to deep dive into topics you’re interested in. Ask Amazon any high level question about doing something and it will now piece together the products you need, punch out things you already have from your history and give you a detailed plan for how to use that plus anything new. Here’s an example where I asked Rufus hypothetically what I would need for a video blog: (edited for brevity and to save space).
RNF5: Easy Reorder
You can be specific or general such as: reorder dog treats or “reorder everything I used to make pecan pie” and Rufus will load your cart up for you.
RNF6: Shop Direct is Now Available In Rufus 🤔
I haven’t been able to recreate this one, so going to include Amazon’s stock screen shot here→
RNF7: Compare with Similar
On many PDPs under the hero image where there have historically been Rufus Prompt Pills, you will now see a ‘compare similar’ prompt pill. You can also manually ask this at any time. Here it is for some On shoes:
Here the Rufus UX is really restricted by the teenie tiny little left hand gutter space it has been allocated. Inside that one inch gutter is a comparison matrix that isn’t super useful because when I scroll i can’t see everything. They clearly need to rethink this UX. If I screen shot it and glue it together for you, here’s what it should look like→
When you see it this way, it’s a great feature, what an awesome table - but when you have to scroll to see 1/2 of the column you can’t tell what’s going on. The feature is significantly diminished by the UI limitation of the Rufus gutter.
RNF8: Personalized Product Summary
The final feature is another “PDP Prompt Pill” feature. In fact if you go back up to my shoe example above- there it is!
The response is kind of funny, can you tell I literally ran this search after the video blogging shopping guide example?
I’ve really got to hit those trails before my next big vlog shoot, phew. 🤪
Pulling it all together…
That’s 8 new awesome Rufus features that are Agentic (scheduled actions) and Personalized (7 out of 8).
The UCP announcement and the Rufus personalization family of features both have one thing in common: Single-directional Embrace and Extend.
UCP - Allows Amazon to super-set all the UCP selection, but in a ‘pull not push’ model - You can shop all the inventory on Amazon, but only UCP everywhere else.
Personalization Features - Your Amazon order history, your wishlists, past Rufus convos and also product browse history are Amazon exclusives. Gemini won’t be able to use these as input (well…if you connect your gmail account that receives your Amazon emails, maybe there’s a back-door to your order history, but it’s not as ‘clean’ as what Amazon has).
Will Amazon’s Embrace and Extend strategy work? Will they be able to push off the competitors at the gates, like Microsoft did with Netscape? We will see. Next up in Amazon-land we have the big Q1 news, we’ll be reporting on what we see there, buckle up it’s going to be a busy week in Agentic Commerce!