A customer’s home is their castle - and a storefront
Digital and omnichannel technology can turn almost any part of a shopper’s home environment into a consumer touchpoint.
At-home digital shopping is nothing new, with e-commerce becoming a mainstream retail channel by the early 2000s. But the entire consumer home habitat is evolving into a commerce-enabled setting. Let’s take a look at how voice devices, apartment floor plans, and streaming TV broadcasts are allowing retailers to reach customers where they live.
Voice of the customer
Amazon is rolling out “Alexa for Shopping” to all U.S. customers on its e-commerce site and app, as well as on Amazon Echo Show smart speakers. The new solution combines the personalization capabilities of the next-gen Alexa+ voice model with the functionality of its Rufus generative AI shopping assistant to deliver a targeted shopping experience where customers can browse and shop the full Amazon store using voice, touch, or both.
[READ MORE: Amazon enables conversational shopping via Alexa voice assistant]
When chatting with Alexa for Shopping, customers can tap the "+" icon next to the message bar to create a scheduled action, such as restocking regular household items, or create more specific prompts like "Add this sunscreen to my cart if the price drops to $10 and I haven't purchased it in the last two months.”
Amazon is also bringing its complete shopping experience directly to the Echo Show. For the first time, customers can browse, search and shop the full Amazon store on their Echo Show device and navigate entirely by voice, touch or both with Alexa as their guide.
From floor plan to sales floor
Amenify is launching a new AI-equipped design and retail solution called 3D Spaces which enables tenants to visualize and purchase furniture and other home décor items for their apartments before moving in. The 3D Spaces solution creates a shoppable 3D digital environment created from an apartment’s actual floor plan.
The solution features an AI agent named “Maddie” that can generate a fully furnished space based on a customer’s taste and preferences from an actual unit floor plan or photo. Shoppers can visualize and place furniture, storage, lighting, and other home furnishings, drawing from a catalog of items from partner retailers across the country.
Customers can walk through 3D, augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR), true-to-scale outfitted rooms before they move in select items, which are available for immediate purchase. Delivery can be timed to coincide with their move-in schedule.
As seen on TV
The visually oriented social network is partnering with the Roku streaming TV platform to air "Bring My Pinterest to Life," an original series produced with B17 Entertainment where viewers can move seamlessly from watching to shopping via Pinterest and its brand partners. The series will debut in March 2026 on Roku.
Across six episodes, creators Drew Michael Scott, Caroline Vazzana, and Tay BeepBoop Nakamoto work with real people to turn their Pinterest boards into real spaces and transformations. Each episode follows a personal “inspiration to realization” journey, led by creator hosts who focus on ideas, products, and brands from featured Pinterest boards in a shoppable format.
The series features integrated brand partners including Wayfair, Eos and Michaels, which are included in the format of the episodes rather than highlighted in traditional ad breaks. Viewers can discover products, save ideas to Pinterest, and shop through featured partners.
In addition, viewers can move from the show to Pinterest for more ideas and boards, or to brand sites to purchase items they’ve just seen on screen.
