How Amazon Alexa Can Lead to Unwanted Online Purchases

How Amazon Alexa Can Lead to Unwanted Online Purchases

You are at work, minding your own business, when you suddenly get an email confirming a recent purchase from Amazon. “That’s impossible,” you think to yourself. You haven’t ordered anything all day. Perhaps that’s true. But maybe someone else ordered via your Amazon smart speaker.

Amazon Alexa, the software that powers devices like Echo and Dot, offers two handy features for people who frequently shop with the retail giant. The first is voice ordering. The second feature adds requested items to your shopping list if Alexa cannot currently find them in Amazon’s inventory. Both could lead to unwanted online purchases.

How It Works

Voice ordering with Alexa involves tying the software to your Amazon account. With voice ordering enabled, you are giving Alexa permission to use the 1-click purchase option built in to your account. If you were online with your computer, you could use the same feature to select a particular item and purchase it without having to go through the entire shopping cart process. Amazon uses your stored account data for billing and shipping purposes.

Alexa’s voice ordering works the same way. So you could tell Alexa to buy just about anything and it will. You can use voice ordering to purchase:

  • toilet paper
  • cutlery
  • electronics
  • toys
  • and on, and on.

Voice ordering is certainly convenient. The annoying part is that anyone within range of your Amazon smart speaker can order anything just by speaking. Why? Because smart speakers listen for any voice. They don’t care whether it’s yours or someone else’s.

Placing Orders Is Too Easy

You could make the case that placing online orders is too easy with Alexa. Take your kids. They learn pretty quickly, right? All they would have to do is witness you make two or three purchases via your Amazon smart speaker to figure out how to do it themselves.

You tell Amazon to buy two or three things while you’re preparing lunch in the kitchen. Then you take your sandwich and drink out to the living room. Meanwhile, your kids use the smart speaker to buy themselves toys or electronics.

The one saving grace is that Amazon immediately sends emails to confirm recent orders. Assuming you check your email right away, you have time to cancel the order before it is packed and shipped. But what if you don’t get to your email for a day or two? You could come home from work and find a couple of packages on your doorstep.

There Are Two Solutions

Perhaps you’re now wondering how you can prevent all this from happening. There is good news, according to Vivint Smart Home. As a nationwide provider of smart home devices, Vivint supports Google and Amazon smart speakers. They say there are two solutions to the voice ordering problem.

The first is to go into the Alexa app and disable voice ordering altogether. That is the fail-safe way to ensure that neither your kids nor your pranking friends order stuff without your knowledge. But then that means you cannot use voice ordering, either.

If you still want to voice order yourself, your second option is to go into the Alexa app and enable the verification code feature. You will have to verbally provide the code whenever you want to place an order. Just make sure you don’t do it in front of the kids, or they will learn the code.

Amazon’s voice order feature is a terrific way to buy things online simply by speaking. But be careful. Voice ordering can lead to unwanted packages delivered to your doorstep. And that can get expensive over time.