Wrapping Up

Alexa skills can be fun to develop, but they can also be a source of income. In-Skill Purchasing enables a skill to offer additional functionality or content via add-ons that can be bought during a user’s session with the skill.

The three types of in-skill products—entitlements, consumables, and subscriptions—enable a range of products, from one-time purchases to buy-per-use to periodic renewal. Which you choose depends on how you’ve designed your merchandising goals for your skill. Even so, the way you define and offer those products are very similar in ASK.

Products are defined in JSON and deployed using the ASK CLI. Upsells, purchases, and refunds are handled through request handlers that include a Connections.SendRequest directive in the response. These directives take the user on a subflow that is entirely handled by Alexa, requiring no work on the skill developer’s part to deal with payment or any other details of the transaction. Finally, upon completion of the transaction, Alexa makes a Connections.Response request to the skill for post-purchase handling.

Whether you hope to make money with your Alexa skill or not, nobody will be able to use it if you don’t make it available outside of your Amazon developer account. In the next chapter, we’re going to take steps to prepare our skill for production use, publishing it so that all Alexa users can plan trips through our solar system.