Editor’s Note: We have changed the name of the Alexa skill in our beginner tutorial from Cake Walk to Cake Time given the term’s racially insensitive history.

We’re excited to introduce our new Alexa Skills course, How to Design for In-Skill Purchasing. This free course outlines the best practices for designing a great monetized Alexa skill experience.

Optimize Your Voice Experience for In-Skill Purchasing

In order to effectively monetize your Alexa skills, you need to design an experience that inspires your customers to continue using your skill over and over. While a portion of the experience depends on the technical implementation (code, information architecture, APIs, etc.) it can only go as far as your voice interaction design. So we created a design-focused course to help you design a skill with in-skill purchasing. You’ll learn what makes great premium content, when to make offers, how to write offers, how to handle transitions to and from the Amazon Purchase flow, and how to provide access to purchases.

By completing this course, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to design and optimize your skill for in-skill purchasing.

Course Components

• Introducing Our Use Case
• Offer the Right Premium Content
• Make an Offer at the Right Time
• Write Effective Upsells
• Make a Smooth Handoff
• Provide Access to Purchases
• Wrapping Up & Resources

Whether you’ve previously built a skill with in-skill purchasing or you’re just starting out, we consider this course to be a milestone along your Alexa skills educational journey. You should be able to speed read through everything in about an hour. Keep in mind that it’s self-paced and you don’t need to do it all at once. In fact, we recommend completing a section or two, pausing to reflect or experiment and then coming back later to continue your learning. This course will also be a great resource to have open in a tab while designing your next monetized skill experience.

Get Started with How to Design for In-Skill Purchasing

The self-paced course is free and available for anyone ready to build Alexa skills. Click here to get started.

Be sure to check out our ongoing multi-part blog series on designing skills with in-skill purchasing which contextualizes many of the themes introduced through out the course with real-world examples:

• Designing Skills for In-Skill Purchasing, Part 1: Scope It Right
• Designing skills for In-Skill Purchasing, Part 2: Surface Upsells

More Resources to Enhance Your Alexa Skills

Once you’ve completed this course, we recommend you continue your learning by checking out these additional training materials:

• Premium Hello World Skill: Learn to implement in-skill purchasing with this simple skill sample and tutorial
• Premium Fact Skill: Learn to implement One Time Purchases, Subscriptions and Consumables together in a fact skill
• Technical documentation: Learn how how in-skill purchasing works at a low-level
• Cake Time: Build an Engaging Alexa Skill: Learn how to get started building engaging experiences.
• Designing for Conversation Course: Learn how to design more dynamic and conversational experiences.
• Alexa Design Guide: Learn the principles of situational voice design so that you can create voice-first skills that are natural and user-centric.