Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills is a way to monetise Amazon’s Echo virtual assistant to enable the purchase of goods or services by consumers using their Amazon payment credentials.
Almost without exception, anyone that owns an Amazon Echo will be an Amazon customer and have their payment credential stored on Amazon. There’s also a high chance that they will be an Amazon Prime customer and so familiar with purchasing through Amazon. Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills is a method of selling to these Amazon customers without listing on the Amazon marketplace.
Selling through an Amazon Alexa Skill will require consumers to activate the Skill so you’ll either need to be a known brand or to present a compelling reason why consumers will want to use your Skill – this will entail some clever marketing perhaps even more so than selling on social media sites like Instagram which we recently wrote about. It will suit products which consumers order on a regular basis and, whilst subscription boxes are on the up, many consumers will prefer to order when supplies run low than have goods arriving whether they’ve used their last order or not.
There are some limitations on what products can be sold on Amazon Alexa Skills, for instance no adult orientated products, alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, weapons or financial services are allowed. However both services and products can be sold.
in order to enable voice commerce on Amazon Echo, a merchant first needs to register with Amazon Pay. Once you’ve registered with Amazon Pay, you simply add Amazon Pay to your Alexa skill. Amazon Pay integrates with existing CRM and order management solutions, so merchants can manage their sales.
For customers, the experience is simple. With Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills, customers can pay for physical goods and services in your skill using the information already in their Amazon account—without needing to remember their username and password. Alexa users grant your skill permission to use Amazon Pay as their default payment, which uses their payment details already pre-configured in their Amazon account.
If you’re interested in building an Amazon Alexa Skill then the Amazon Alexa Skills Kit is the place to start.
