Alexa Skill Development: Benefits and Applications For eCommerce

Voice assistants are evolving into the new modern man’s best friend! A voice assistance integrated device can assist you in many ways, from making routine calls to waking you up in the morning. 

Today, people worldwide use digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistants frequently. We’ll discuss the development and integration of Alexa skills to help you understand the hype and how it can help you, in the eCommerce sector, get your product to interact with the target market. 

Alexa skills are tools and features businesses use to make it easier for customers to use the Alexa voice assistant to access their apps, goods, and services. You should definitely consider how this could help the success of your eCommerce business. 

Imagine the potential for conversion rate improvement if users could simply say the name of a product to order from a shopping app rather than spending hours browsing. It would undoubtedly make interaction easy and aid businesses in reducing turnover. 

Stay tuned if achieving this fits with your plans for business growth! We will explain the development process, advantages, and uses of Alexa Skills to help you understand how it can assist your eCommerce business in achieving this. 

An introduction to Alexa skill Development 

Amazon manages and creates the voice assistant service known as Alexa. Alexa is built into every echo device, making it simple and quick to navigate shopping, play music, and find product information. 

The Alexa voice assistant makes use of Alexa skills for this. It enables Alexa to understand user commands and carry them out appropriately. 

The Process Behind the Amazon Alexa skill Development

Although it is strange to discover that your speaker comprehends you better than your neighbors, rest assured that it is not some peculiar occult! Alexa Skills development is based on a solid architecture that makes it interact with users and comprehend voice commands. 

Let’s use the straightforward example of asking an Alexa-integrated device to wake you up to understand this better: 

Consider setting the alarm for seven in the morning. You start by telling Alexa to wake you up at seven in the morning. This will trigger an Alexa Skill (think of it as an app) to set the alarm. Once the appropriate skill is activated, it will call a lambda function to set the alarm and wake you up at 7 in the morning. 

Benefits of Alexa Skill Development

You would have to invest a lot of time and money to start the Alexa Skill development process. Therefore, you must ensure that the benefits of Alexa skills align with your current business needs to ensure that this investment pays off favorably for your business.  

Additionally, by being aware of the advantages of Amazon Alexa skill development, you can monitor how beneficial the process is for your company.  

The following is a list of benefits the Alexa Skills development process has for your eCommerce business: 

Improved Interaction: Your app’s functionalities will be more accessible for users to access with the help of Alexa Skills development. In the long run, it would imply that your users wouldn’t need to access the app directly to use its functionalities. Using voice commands can easily enhance that, significantly improving the user’s experience. 

Competitive Edge: Developing an Amazon Alexa skill will let your app be ahead of the lot. Since your business will be able to use a unique process that improves accessibility and makes navigation more engaging. This will aid in giving your brand a distinct identity that will help it make more potential users. 

Increased functional scope: The Alexa Skill Kit frequently receives new updates and features. Consequently, with the help of the Alexa Skill development process, your business application will have a broader scope for growth and functionality enhancement. This would help your business stay current and meet changing user demands in the long term. 

Market Acceptance: Investors have recently started praising Alexa Skills as their development is slowly picking up. Early adoption of Alexa Skills will help your company establish a reputation for being forward-thinking and creative. In the long run, this can assist you in ensuring favorable media coverage of your services. 

Huge Market: The majority of devices use Alexa as a voice assistant. You can easily access Alexa’s sizable user base and market by developing your skills with the development. Ultimately, it denotes improved outreach and a higher likelihood of conversions. 

How to Use Alexa Skills for my eCommerce Brand. Can I make Skills for My Business App on Alexa? 

Glad you inquired! Yes, you can make Alexa skills to enhance its navigation and complement your digital solutions. You can use the Alexa Skills Kit that Amazon offers or hire a software development company with expertise in developing Amazon Alexa Skills and discuss your ideas with them. Though costs and turnaround times for developing Alexa skills vary from agency to agency, the size and complexity of your project have the most extensive impact. 

In your personal life, using Alexa skills and smart technology is undoubtedly enjoyable and helpful. But you might not be aware that Alexa can help your online eCommerce business in other ways, apart from the benefits we discussed earlier. 

Here are some ways to use Alexa skills to boost your business’s internal processes and the customer experience. 

Product Suggestions 

An Alexa skill can look for a specific type or style of product and recommend it via email newsletters with a buy link that directs the email recipient to the retailer’s website. They can purchase it and look for additional options such as size, color, etc. For instance, you might ask Alexa to “find me a red to wear to a birthday party.” 

Offers and Coupons 

Through voice commands, Alexa can inform customers of the current store specials and offer information for coupons. For instance, “Alexa, find me a coupon” or “Alexa, find me the deal of the day.” 

Product Acquisition 

Want to provide your customers with a better experience as a customer-owner? With Alexa, your customers can buy products by speaking their voice through the Alexa device’s catalog. A user can use Alexa to order a product after making their choice. ‘Alexa, order some coffee.’ 

Reorder 

Customers can easily place a voice order for their preferred product on Alexa. Additionally, this will increase the order of orders and customer lifetime value. Alexa, reorder my moisturizer. 

Quick Checkout 

Alexa will use the Amazon pay 1-click setting to give customers a quick checkout experience when a customer tries to place a new order or choose any item to purchase. After selecting a product, users only need to say, “Alexa, buy this.” 

Cart management 

This feature allows customers to use voice commands to manage their cart on Alexa devices. Customers can get the cart, add or remove items, clear the cart of all items, and place items for all of the items in the cart. For instance, you could ask Alexa, “what’s in my cart” or “Alexa, clear my cart.” 

Manage Subscriptions 

Customers can manage their product subscriptions for products they frequently order. They can alter the frequency, skip a delivery, or determine when the subsequent delivery will occur. Alexa, when is my next delivery, for instance, or “Alexa, skip my next delivery.” 

FAQ 

This feature enables an online retailer to answer common questions from customers. The user will receive a variety of FAQ responses from this, and customers will be able to know more about you and your products. For instance, “Alexa, explain how your product works.” 

Store Locator, Business Hours, and Future Events 

Your customers can look up the nearest store, the hours of operation, and upcoming events in a specific store using this feature. Customers can set their default store as the one closest to them and obtain information about other stores by mentioning the location name, such as store hours and upcoming events. For instance, “Alexa, find a store near me” or “Alexa, what are the central mall store hours.” 

Rules and services 

This will include details about your return policy, order cancellation policy, and customer service information. It’s for providing the customer with information about your procedures and contact details that will be helpful to them. For instance, you could ask Alexa, “Alexa, what is your return policy,” or “Alexa, what is your shipping policy.” 

Flash Briefings 

A feature that customers can use to get information every day. It offers all kinds of information, including news, advice, facts, and some daily releases. Customers must activate this Alexa feature to receive daily flash briefings. Simply asking Alexa, “What are the flash briefings” or “Alexa, read my flash briefings” will do. 

Order Status 

With the help of this feature, a customer can ask Alexa for the most recent order status. The customer only needs to ask Alexa, “What’s my order status,” to learn the order status. 

Notifications 

This is a very intriguing Alexa feature. By utilizing this feature, we can inform customers about their orders and the products they are looking for but cannot buy at the moment. The user will get a real-time notification on their Alexa devices. They must make notifications for the particular order and products available for this. 

The process for developing Alexa skills 

Understanding what takes place during the development of an Alexa skill is essential for planning and successfully implementing its functionality. Because it will enable you to help a comprehensive understanding of the entire process. To help you gain a better understanding, the following is a step-by-step blueprint of the Amazon Alexa skill development process. 

Skills Development for Alexa 

The development team will examine your digital solution to find the scope for Alexa skill integration before beginning the development of Alexa skills. 

After the discussion has cleared up the areas where Alexa skills can be helpful, the development process will begin. 

The development team will utilize Alexa Skill Kit during the development process. A toolkit designed to help develop Alexa Skills is what the Alexa Skill Kit essentially is. It has tools and APIs that make the development process easier. 

The team will test the effectiveness of the Alexa Skill after the development process is complete and will also solicit your feedback. The developers will then move on to the deployment phase once they are satisfied with the finished products. 

The Alexa skills will then be installed on your live app and made accessible to everyone. Our agency also offers maintenance support for a limited time to help you become accustomed to using Alexa Skills. 

Conclusion

Using Alexa skills with the Amazon Echo to play music or check the weather is excellent. But there’s a lot more you can do. Ecommerce businesses can use Amazon Alexa skills development for business to improve efficiency and even boost sales. The time has come to help how using Alexa skills can benefit you.