Introduction
By implementing Apple In-App Purchase in your iOS App, you can sell a wide variety of content, including services, new features, and subscriptions. To implement In-App Purchase in your iOS App, first, you need to fulfill a few requirements.
| Note: You can now enable third-party payment providers—such as Stripe, Braintree, Razorpay, and others—on iOS apps. However, this update currently applies only to apps published on the U.S. App Store. |
What is Apple’s In-App Purchase
In-app purchases are extra content or subscriptions that you can buy in apps on your iOS devices. Apple Pay or any 3rd party payment gateways can be used to sell physical goods such as groceries, clothing, and appliances. Also, Apple Pay can be used for purchasing services such as club memberships, hotel reservations, and tickets for events.
You are required to use Apple’s In-App Purchase to sell virtual goods such as premium content for your app and subscriptions for digital content. Specifically, Apple’s developer terms require that the In-App Purchase must be used for digital “content, functionality, or services” such as premium features or credits. When your users register or buy any content through Apple’s In-App Purchase, Apple will deduct 30% of the payment made by your users and will give you the rest 70%.
| Note: Once your app becomes a year old in the iTunes App Store with an in-app purchase option, Apple will reduce the revenue share percentage from 30% to 15%. |
Requirements for In-App Purchase
You need to fulfill the following requirements.
- Paid Apple ID with In-App Purchase feature enabled.
- It’s also good to double-check the Agreements, Tax, and Banking section in iTunes Connect.
- If you see a section entitled Request Contracts containing a row for Paid Applications, then click on the Request
- Fill out all the necessary information and submit it.
- It may take some time for your request to be approved.
- Otherwise, if you see Paid Applications listed under Contracts in Effect, then it looks like you have already completed this step.
- Privacy Policy URL required at the time of uploading the application to the iTunes App Store.
- Terms of Use link for the iOS App.
- After the successful integration of In-App Purchase in the iOS application, we must test it with Sandbox mode, and then, after the application goes live then we can test with a proper Apple ID with a proper monetization process. So, users must be aware of it before they test the app. Apple has reviewed all the plans you have set on the Apple Dashboard with your App.
- Subscription Details with Plan Details.
- Description of the App with Plans, which will be shown in the App Description in the iTunes App Store.
| Note: Before adding any payment method in In-App Purchase, please let us know about it. We will help you with this. Otherwise, Apple may reject your app if you try to add any payment method without informing us. |
External ID
When you add an Apple In-App purchase billing gateway to the CMS, Muvi has to enable the “External ID” option to map the Subscription and/or PPV plans with the Apple Dashboard.
When you add a Subscription and/or PPV plan into the CMS, we use the same details and add those plans in the Apple Dashboard under your account. After that, we use the “External ID” generated by Apple and add that to Muvi CMS just to relate the plans to each other.
Muvi does the authentication when each content is being played by the end-user. By doing this, we assure that your end-users will have a seamless experience while using the In-App purchase service.