Introducing New Works with Alexa (WWA) Requirements

The Works with Alexa (WWA) program has helped increase the exposure of Alexa-connected products to millions of customers who shop on Amazon.com every day. The WWA program ensures your Alexa-connected devices provide a great customer experience, and helps you increase customer awareness and confidence in your products and brand. Today, we are introducing new certification requirements for the Works with Alexa program as part of our ongoing efforts to raise the bar on the responsiveness, reliability, and functionality of connected devices to deliver the best possible smart home experience for our shared customers. These updates will provide more opportunities for you to generate revenue through Smart Reorders, and to increase customer satisfaction and engagement for your products.

New Eligibility Requirements:

In order to qualify for the WWA program, products submitted for certification must meet the new criteria listed below where applicable. A full updated list of WWA eligibility criteria can be found under the Works with Alexa Program Guidelines.

• SimpleEventSource: Starting on April 24, 2023, any new device seeking WWA certification that has implemented the Alexa.SimpleEventSource interface will be required to be tested under the SimpleEventSource test plan to qualify for the WWA program. This test plan will help ensure that you have implemented the SimpleEventSource correctly to provide the best smart home experience for customers. Devices that did not implement the Alexa SimpleEventSource interface are not required to go through this testing. You can learn more about the SimpleEventSource test plan here.
  
  
• Low Supply Notifications and Smart Reorders: On September 26, 2022, we announced inventory sensor interfaces (Alexa.InventoryLevelSensor, Alexa.InventoryLevelUsageSensor, or Alexa.InventoryUsageSensor) as a new requirement for WWA certification for printers, motion/contact sensors, battery operated smart locks, battery operated cameras, and air purifier device types. Starting on April 28, 2023, this requirement will be in effect and any new WWA certification application that falls under the aforementioned device types in the following locales (de-DE, en-GB, en-US, es-ES, es-US, fr-FR, it-IT, ja-JP) will be required to complete inventory sensor interface implementation and testing in the Dash Replenishment certification console and obtain a Dash model ID before they can be eligible to request the WWA badge in the WWA console.
  
  These interfaces will allow Alexa to provide customers with information on the approximate usage of a consumable product (such as batteries, toner, and air filters) installed in these devices. Customers can be notified when it is time to replace these consumables, or sign up for smart reordering and let Alexa automatically reorder supplies when they are running low. When Smart Reorders is enabled, you can benefit when customers elect to purchase consumables that you sell, or if you do not sell your own consumables, you can receive a share of every purchase a customer makes through a low supply notification.
  
  
• Availability: Maintaining a highly available and reliable service will allow customers to control your Alexa compatible devices at any time, and is key to increasing customer satisfaction and engagement. Starting on May 01, 2023, services for WWA certified devices will be required to maintain the following availability requirements.
  
  
  • Maintain 99.93% availability annually, equating to no more than 4 hours and 5-minutes of downtime for 2023 (prorated starting from May 1st). Starting in 2024, Availability will be calculated starting January 1st, equating to no more than 6-hours, 8-minutes of downtime.
  • Have no more than five outages annually.
  • Availability metric and outage count will reset on January 1st each year.

If your service for the WWA certified devices is approaching the Availability threshold listed above and is at risk of disrupting Alexa’s ability to serve a significant amount of customers, you will receive an E-mail reminder with tips and recommendations on how to improve Availability. If the Availability metric continues to decline and goes under the required thresholds, the ASINs associated with the impacted end devices will lose their eligibility for the WWA program and have their WWA badge removed. Your ability to request WWA badge for new ASINs will also be put on hold. To reinstate the WWA eligibility, the impacted devices must maintain 99.93% availability for three consecutive months, while maintaining all other existing WWA program requirements.

Learn More

To learn more the Works with Alexa program, including the certification process and eligibility requirements, please visit the developer documentation pages listed below. To get started with Works with Alexa certification, click here to access the WWA console.

Works with Alexa program overview

Works with Alexa certification requirements