Building Quick Subscribe — Amazon IAP Integration at Scale

One of the most impactful features I worked on at Sky was the Quick Subscribe integration for Peacock on Amazon Fire devices. The problem was straightforward — users landing on our app detail page on Amazon had no way to initiate a subscription without leaving Amazon's ecosystem. The solution changed our subscription rates dramatically.

The Problem

Amazon Fire device users would discover Peacock on the Amazon App Store, click through to our detail page, and hit a dead end. There was no call-to-action to subscribe — users had to download the app first, open it, and navigate to a subscription flow. The drop-off rate at this stage was significant.

The Solution — Amazon In-App Purchase API

Amazon provides an In-App Purchase (IAP) API that allows apps to trigger subscription flows directly from within the Amazon ecosystem. We decided to implement a Quick Subscribe button that would appear on our Amazon detail page and complete the entire subscription flow without the user ever leaving Amazon.

The Technical Challenge

The authentication flow was the most complex part. To subscribe a user via Amazon IAP, we needed to chain several dependent async calls:

• ▹Check for a pending transaction
• ▹Retrieve the user's consent status
• ▹Exchange an authorisation code for an access token
• ▹Use the access token alongside our credentials to authenticate the user

These calls had dependencies between them — you couldn't check consent without a pending transaction — but some could be parallelised safely. Mapping the dependency graph before writing any code was essential.

async function authenticateViaAmazonIAP(): Promise<User> {
  // Step 1 — Check for pending transaction
  const transaction = await checkPendingTransaction();
  if (!transaction) throw new PendingTransactionError();

  // Step 2 — Get consent (depends on transaction)
  const consent = await getUserConsent(transaction.id);

  // Steps 3 & 4 — Parallelise independent calls
  const [authCode, credentials] = await Promise.all([
    exchangeAuthorisationCode(consent.code),
    getPartnerCredentials(),
  ]);

  return authenticateUser(authCode, credentials);
}

The Result

After shipping Quick Subscribe, our subscription rate on Amazon Fire devices increased by 40%. The feature is now part of the standard onboarding flow across all Amazon Fire device variants.

Key Learnings

• ▹Always map async dependencies before writing code — some calls can be parallelised, others can't
• ▹Amazon IAP has edge cases around token expiry that need explicit handling
• ▹Test on real hardware — Fire TV Stick behaviour differs from the simulator in subtle ways