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Alexa Blogs
When four former Amazonians founded Wyze Labs in July 2017, they were on a mission: to challenge the notion that full-featured, easy-to-use, smart home cameras had to be expensive. Only one year after introducing the first generation Wyze Cam, they’ve introduced new cameras, new features, added Alexa connectivity, and achieved Works with Alexa (WWA) certification - helping them to achieve their goal of selling 1 million devices in its first year.
“In October, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of Wyze Cam and a major milestone in our business,” says Elana Fishman, co-founder and chief operating officer of Wyze Labs. “Thanks to having a reliable product, a great customer experience, and the Works with Alexa badge, we’re thrilled to have sold a million cameras in only 12 months.”
Sharing Amazon’s obsession with providing premium customer experiences, Wyze’s leadership team immediately recognized the growth opportunities offered by the Works with Alexa program. Works with Alexa is a certification program that helps assure customers the products they buy will integrate smoothly with Alexa. WWA-certified devices can carry the Works with Alexa badge, appear in the Amazon Smart Home store, and can be considered for additional co-marketing opportunities. For Wyze, adding Alexa support gave existing Wyze customers the Alexa integration they wanted, and becoming WWA certified increased customer awareness and confidence in the Wyze brand.
“Even though we exceed our customers’ expectations, buyers are often skeptical they can actually get such a high-quality camera at our competitive price tag,” says Fishman. “The Works with Alexa badge helped change that. It adds an extra stamp of quality to our products, so shoppers are confident in selecting our cameras over non-certified devices.”
What Customers Want: An Affordable High-Quality Smart Camera -with Alexa Integration
Wyze set out to build a high-quality smart home security camera that anyone could afford. Only three months after setting up shop, they launched the first Wyze Cam and quickly sold out in their first quarter of sales. But even after such a successful launch, Wyze wanted to improve its cameras and the user experience.
“Having used Amazon Launchpad to build our first major sales channel, we asked customers which integrations they wanted, directly on our Amazon.com product page,” says Fishman. “And the top customer request, again and again, was Alexa.”
Wyze decided to give customers what they wanted: the ability to view their Wyze Cam live stream video via Alexa. To do that, they needed to create an Alexa smart home skill. Wyze re-architected some of its communication mechanisms to integrate with Alexa. The Wyze Cam uses a peer-to-peer connection to stream video to the mobile app, instead of the cloud model used with Alexa smart home skills. The Wyze team made the investment of time and resources to make the Wyze Cam compatible with Alexa because they knew it was important to customers.
No longer limited to a smartphone app, Wyze customers can now use natural voice commands to view their camera video feeds on more devices than ever, including Alexa-enabled devices with screens like Echo Show, Echo Spot, and Fire TVs.
Works with Alexa: A Boost to the Business to Reach 1 Million Units Sold
Works with Alexa certification communicates to customers that your products integrate seamlessly with Alexa, with the WWA badge added to your products in both the Alexa Smart Home Store and offline channels. For Wyze, WWA certification came just in time for Prime Day 2018, allowing them to use the WWA badge during this significant sales opportunity And Wyze isn’t alone in seeing a sales uplift after achieving WWA certification. In fact, sales analysis across the entire Amazon Smart Home store shows a double-digit sales uplift after achieving WWA certification for the 8 weeks post-certification compared to the 8 weeks pre-certification.
“What our customers asked for was to use our cameras with Alexa, and it was an awesome thing to deliver on that,” says Fishman. “But from the business side, WWA has opened up a lot of lucrative marketing opportunities not otherwise available to us.” With the WWA badge, Fishman says the Wyze Cam started “showing up all over Amazon.com” with other Alexa-compatible smart devices, immediately increasing its visibility. Wyze was also able to create promotional bundles of its cameras with Echo Show and Echo Spot, right in time for the holidays. And, as if heightened online visibility wasn’t enough, Amazon invited Wyze to feature its cameras in Amazon’s physical retail locations, including Amazon 4-Star, Amazon Books, and Amazon Pop-Ups in malls across America. And the WWA badge can be used on product packaging and marketing materials in other online and physical retail locations, increasing customer confidence wherever your products are sold.
“The Works with Alexa program opens up a huge number of opportunities for partnerships, visibility, and general customer awareness of our products,” says Fishman. “Works with Alexa has helped us grow our sales even faster by expanding both our online and offline footprint, while delivering a great experience to our customers.”
Visit the Works with Alexa certification program site to learn more and get started. We can’t wait to see what you build.
