Amazon’s Rufus AI Shopping Assistant Now Lets Other Shoppers Check Price History

If Amazon’s experiment of sharing price history with Rufus grows and survives, it could be an important reason for users to try the chatbot. Trishul Chilimbi, Amazon’s vice president in charge of research, wrote last week that his teams trained Rufus on all products, reviews, and Q&A postings on the company’s website and other public information elsewhere on the web. In other words, Rufus provides easy access to information that the user can kill.

But subtle or behind-the-scenes data, such as price changes, are more difficult to obtain. In the case of the LifeStraw filter, popular price tracking tools CamelCamelCamel and Glass had no data when WIRED tried them. Another service, Keepa, had data going back to 2017 showing a low of $8 in 2022.

Keepa and Glass It executives told WIRED they aren’t worried about competition from Rufus. They say their data is extensive and powers a variety of tools, including price alerts. “Amazon is taking steps to provide historical price data directly to users which is good for all of us as consumers who want to make informed purchasing decisions,” said Amor Avhad, founder of Glass It.

Amazon has been driven down by a lack of transparency in some parts of its business. In two ongoing lawsuits, the US Federal Trade Commission has separately accused Amazon of deceptive and anti-competitive practices that kept buyers and sellers in the dark about subscription renewals and sales algorithms. But when it comes to the price of the product, Amazon is somehow ahead with the consumers.

Users who let an item sit in their cart for a while are notified by Amazon if the price of that item has changed in any way even by a cent since they were first added. If Amazon feels that its item price is not competitive compared to other stores, it may hide the Buy button and require users to click through additional screens to complete the purchase.

How access to price history will affect traders caught in the middle remains to be seen. Tristan Månsson-Perrone of Radius Outfitters, the Amazon seller whose tool kit was among the featured deals this week, says it doesn’t adjust prices regularly. So customers may not be able to glean much from asking Rufus, he says.

All in all, Amazon has emphasized that it wants Rufus – named after the corgi that occupied the company’s first office – to be a loyal companion. Ask him to summarize the reviews, and highlight the good and the bad. It recommends non-Amazon products and does not appear overly commercial.

But WIRED couldn’t get Rufus to help with so-called ethical shopping questions, including which brands supported certain sides in wars or elections. There’s also uncertainty about whether tools like Rufus will erode revenue from the peer review industry, which WIRED included. That limitation and anxiety were the afterthoughts when Rufus felt like an unattractive copy. With exclusive pricing data, it can start to become a consumer’s best friend.