iPhone - in-app purchase to sell our products

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+2 Q:

iPhone - in-app purchase to sell our products

I have a website which sells a product to the user (downloadable). I am creating an iPhone app and want to be able to sell some of the products using the 3.0's in-app purchase.

Now the documentation mentions that anything you want to sell has to be uploaded to itunes connect and approved by Apple. But I want to be able to keep adding products to be sold by my app on a daily basis.

I have a web service to get the list of products from the website. Is it possible to include in-app purchase to let user buy this stuff from within the app but without having to add them to itunes connect?

Thanks

+9 A:

As I understand it, no - all the things you want to sell via in-app purchase run through a vetting process similar to that of the apps themselves. Apple won't allow, for example, a "photo of the day" application if you can in-app purchase pornographic photos to be sent to you daily.

What you could probably do is submit your app with a backlog of in-app purchases, five or six days ahead of time, then consistently be submitting your daily items ahead of when you want them to be available. Not sure how reliable the review process is, or whether this will work for your situation - just a thought.

Tim 2009-06-27 05:13:04

I understand the process isn't reliable. Though, you should be notified once the app/item is available. So, in theory, you should be able to setup a flag in your database and once you get the 'thumbs-up' notice from Apple, and you could flip the switch....

Frank V 2009-06-27 05:16:43

Thanks for the reply Tim. No porn here, just some ebooks! So what ur saying is I'll have to add all the ebooks to itunes connect and only then it will be available? i just want them to be available for my app - that would be possible right? i can just download the bought item to the app's Documents folder?

lostInTransit 2009-06-27 05:38:52

Correct - if you want to use in-app purchase to provide your ebooks, they all need to go through iTunes Connect. Once they're approved, you can just download and store them to your users' iPhones.

Tim 2009-06-27 13:57:23

Will this be indicated as a different "app" when you have more ebooks or other content? Does anyone have an example of how it works now? - Jamotion

2009-10-02 21:07:10

Not as an app. You have to register the ebooks or content in iTunes Connect as in-app purchases. You can either keep them in the app and allow access to the users only if they buy it or you can keep them on a server and once user buys the product, you download it from the server after proper receipt verification.

lostInTransit 2009-10-03 08:50:36

i believe we should be able to configure plan with in app purchase not separate to particular product , whereas it should be categorized by group of items in one product. so for example i have bunch of 20 books with $0.99 to sell i can sell them all in Plan A and i can then dynamically add new books in same plan A to server and so on. process purchase process in iphone.

this way we will not need to configure each separate product in itunes connect to sell. because otherwise it is not at all useful for selling large number of items through in app purchase and apple may loose profit of 30% from single item sell.

Please share your ideas

Thanks Nekin

Nekin 2010-03-25 07:13:49

@Nekin - I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. If you have a question to ask, please do so using the "ask question" link in the upper right of the page, and remember that StackOverflow is not a forum - "Please share your ideas" is not likely to be received well.

Tim 2010-04-13 18:10:31

ansaurus

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iPhone - in-app purchase to sell our products

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