What Makes a Great Premium Skill?

Quality premium skills add additional content to an already engaging experience:

  • Help customers get their money's worth. Encourage repeat usage of your skill. Give customers a reason to come back daily or weekly with fresh content or to unlock new content or rewards for continued use.
  • Offer a seamless customer experience. Customers can clearly distinguish between premium and free content, can easily discover and access the skill’s premium offerings, and the skill handles all possible outcomes of the purchase user flow
  • Provide a compelling free experience. The premium experience is meant to enhance the skill with more useful features or tools and to provide additional content. Before you add a premium experience to your skill, you first need to build an engaging skill that resonates with customers and keeps them coming back.

What are the types of in-skill purchases? 

  1. Consumable: Provides access to premium content that can be purchased, depleted when used, and purchased again. For example: A trivia skill offers a hint to a difficult question for a one-time fee.
  2. Subscription: Allows customers to pay a flat monthly fee for access to all content, or for tiered access to content. For example, a radio broadcaster allows access to all channels and content on Alexa for a flat monthly rate.
  3. One-time purchase: Provides access to premium content that never expires. For example, a trivia game offers additional themed packs of quizzes customers can re-play for a one-time fee.

Learn how to build a skill with In-Skill Purchasing

You can also check out the following resources to learn more about In-Skill Purchasing and prepare for the challenge. For more help, check out the page Make Money through In-Skill Purchasing for more details.

NEW: Learn How to Design for In-Skill Purchasing

Our free Alexa Skills course, How to Design for In-Skill Purchasing, outlines the best practices for designing a great monetized Alexa skill experience. By completing this course, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to design and optimize your skill for in-skill purchasing.

Course Components

Office Hours

Join the Alexa evangelists during weekly Office Hours on the Twitch livestream. They can help you with all of your Alexa and ISP-specific technical questions. They’re a great resource so make sure you take part! Weekly on Tuesdays starting at 9:00am PT on Twitch.

Introductory Guide

The Introductory Guide provides an overview on premium product offerings and share tips and best practices to help you kick-start your challenge submission

Sample Skills - Dive into Skill Code with These Code Samples on github:

  • Premium Hello World Skill – A great beginner sample with a tutorial on building for with In-Skill Purchasing
  • Premium Fact Skill – A more Robust, Intermediate code sample that shows One Time Purchases, Subscriptions, and Consumables being used together in a fact skill

Developer Documentation

Blogs

Best Practices

New to skill building? Take some foundational training:

Forum

Twitch Streams:

Check out three of our twitch streams on In-Skill Purchasing below to get started.

 

FAQ on India Participants:

Some developers in India have asked why they can't participate in this competition, unlike the other Alexa competitions we've powered. The reason is that developers based in India are currently unable to add in-skill purchasing to their skills in any locale at this time. To learn more about ISP availability in different regions and countries, you can read our documentation here.  We're very sorry that residents of India can't participate in this challenge, and look forward to hopefully having you in the next one.