You have spent many weeks coding and now your Skill has been completed but how do you go about publishing it?
In order to publish your Skill, it must first be submitted in order to ‘pass certification’ on Amazon.
Firstly, sign into your Amazon Alexa account and then navigate to your Skill.
Once you are on your developer’s page, click on ‘Certification’ on the toolbar at the top of the page.
You will be sent to a ‘Validation’ screen. This will quickly scan through your Skill for any problems and may take a few minutes. You must click on the ‘Run’ button in the top right of the page to start the validation check. Once the scan has completed, you will be presented with either a cross with red highlighted text or a tick with green highlighted text. Red highlighted text represents a problem with your Skill. There will be a compiled list of problems that you must fix on your skill before you are able to continue with ‘Submission’. Green highlighted text means that there are no problems with your Skill and it is ready for the next step.
The ‘Submission’ page is the final part of publishing your Skill. You need to update your ‘publishing preference’ to either set it to automatic publishing or manual publishing. Once that has been selected, you can add a ‘version message’ so that you can see what has changed in the past when it comes to selecting between different versions of your Skill. To submit, you will have to click on ‘Submit for review’ which is in the top right of the screen.
Your ‘Skill status’ can be seen at the very bottom of the page.
Once it has been submitted for a review, the Amazon team will allocate you a date in which your Skill status is due to be reviewed. This can take anything from a few hours up to a few weeks, depending on how heavy the traffic is and how many other Skills have been submitted.
You will receive via email whether the Skill has been promoted to ‘Live’ or not. If it did not pass the checks, the team will send you a list with instructions on how to correct your Skill. After correcting the problems, you will be able to re-submit your Skill.
