Amazon Pay for Alexa

Seamless checkout and payments for Alexa skill customers and developers

The Challenge

Amazon Pay wanted to take their existing web check out functionality to create a seamless payment experience on Alexa. The current options to transact from non-Amazon companies on Alexa were cumbersome and required customers to link an account with the Alexa skill developer. For example, if a customer wanted to ask Alexa to place an order for their favorite drink from Starbucks, they’d need to first link their Amazon and Starbucks accounts. This required logging into multiple accounts and set up within the Alexa app. The goal of the Amazon Pay speechlet on Alexa was to empower developers and customers by allowing end users to purchase any good or service on Alexa from any company using the payment method stored in their Amazon account.

 

High level system flow of design assets I created including conversational/voice design on Alexa and transaction management on Amazon.com

 
 

Mobile app flow allows users to update user account payment preferences

Alexa app payment cards makes accessing transaction information easy

 

My Role

I took this project over from a designer leaving the team and led it as the only designer on the team. I was responsible for all touch points for customers and skill developers including voice flows, user testing, developer management tools, and Alexa app assets. The end experience is a quick conversation with Alexa, but in order to support that I had to create registration and management tools for skill developers.

After launch, I continued to own the customer experience for multiple years as we added new features to the experience and made modifications to support changes in regional payment regulations.

Process

Voice commerce was an emerging field and examples of good voice payment experiences were rare at the time. There were four areas I focused on to figure it out:

Vision. The speechlet was designed to unlock a new commerce channel for Amazon Pay. We didn’t know all the future use cases so the design needed to be flexible enough to support one time payments, subscriptions, third party payment processors, and future growth.

Enabling all users. In order for Amazon Pay to succeed on Alexa it needed to be seamless for customers and manageable for skill developers. I had to determine what features needed to support customization and where Amazon Pay could standardize to reduce skill developer effort.

Recovery. Checkout is a small part of customer’s larger experience and I had to create a UX that seamlessly fit into any Alexa skill experience. When payment issues happen Amazon Pay needs to handle it gracefully and help customers recover quickly.

International. Amazon Pay planned to launch internationally to support Alexa users in all regions. To support this I managed translations of the voice experience as well as regional differences in legal and payment regulations.

 
 

My design documentation includes complete system flows, voice design prompts, permission management, device visual interfaces, Alexa app cards, and more.

 

Impact

Amazon Pay speechlet launched in the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) in the US, EU and JP in 2018 and was used by internal and external developers in all Alexa channels (Alexa app, Echo devices, etc.). Customers could now checkout on Alexa with no account setup. If they had an Amazon.com account, they could use Amazon Pay. It powered all types of transactions on Alexa including donating to charities, getting movie tickets, ordering coffee, and paying at gas stations. The launch met strategic goals for Amazon Pay, supported other internal Alexa teams, and resulted in new business partnerships with payment aggregators bringing in a large amount of new business to Amazon Pay. Amazon Pay later launched in India where is has continued to be a popular feature customized to support balance loading and other country specific requirements.

This feature was deprecated for US customers in 2025 when Alexa+ launched and third party skills were no longer supported, however the payments infrastructure I designed continues to support payment experiences in like tickets purchases, ride shares, and other new experiences that require payment to a third party company.

 

Companies and organization that developed skill on Alexa using the Amazon Pay speechlet.

 
 

A detailed case study is available upon request