Overview

Amazon has rolled out a new “Help Me Decide” option inside its Rufus AI shopping assistant. The feature surfaces a single, AI‑chosen product when a shopper is stuck between similar items, explaining why that choice fits the shopper’s recent activity. Sellers need to understand how the recommendation engine works because it adds a fresh, AI‑driven step to the path from discovery to purchase.

Key Points

• One‑product focus — Instead of a side‑by‑side comparison, the AI selects a single item that best matches the shopper’s context and supplies a plain‑language justification.
• Behavior‑based intent detection — The system links recent browsing, past orders, and saved items to infer a specific use case, such as recommending an all‑season tent to a user who has viewed sleeping bags and bought a camping stove.
• Price‑sensitive matching — Recommendations stay within the price band the shopper is currently exploring, while still offering “cheaper” or “premium” alternatives if the user clicks to expand the range.
• Automatic trigger — The button appears when a customer views multiple comparable listings without adding any to the cart, and it also shows up in the “Continue shopping for” carousel on the Amazon homepage.
• Transparent rationale — Each suggestion includes a short explanation that cites product specs, review sentiment, or performance metrics that led the AI to pick that item.

How Help Me Decide Works

1. Trigger detection — Amazon’s backend monitors a shopper’s session for patterns such as three or more views of similar products in a single category without a purchase. For example, a user who opens three different Bluetooth speaker pages in a row will see the “Help Me Decide” button appear on the third page.
2. Context aggregation — When the shopper clicks the button, Rufus pulls together the current session data (search terms, items in the cart, recently viewed pages) plus historical data (previous orders, wish‑list items, saved searches). In a concrete scenario, a buyer who previously bought a noise‑cancelling earbud, searched for “long‑haul travel headphones,” and is now looking at several over‑ear models will have all those signals combined.