Posted by Laura Nechita – Product Supervisor, Google Play and Rejane França – Group Product Supervisor, Google Play
Beginning right now, Google Play is revamping the best way builders can handle one time merchandise, offering higher flexibility and new methods to promote. Play has frequently enhanced the methods builders can attain consumers by serving to you to diversify the best way you may promote merchandise.
Beginning in 2022, we created extra flexibility for subscriptions and a brand new Console interface. And now, we’re bringing the identical flexibility to one-time merchandise, aligning the taxonomy for our one-time merchandise. Beforehand often called in-app merchandise, one-time product purchases are an important manner for builders to monetize on Google Play. As this enterprise mannequin continues to evolve, we have heard from a lot of you that you simply want extra flexibility and fewer complexity in the way you provide these digital merchandise.
To deal with these wants, we’re launching new capabilities and a brand new mind-set about your merchandise that may assist you to develop your small business. At its core, we have separated what the product is from the way you promote it. For every one-time product, now you can configure a number of buy choices and presents. This lets you promote the identical product in a number of methods, lowering operational prices by eradicating the necessity to create and handle an ever-increasing variety of catalog objects.
You may need already seen some modifications as we introduce this new mannequin, which gives a extra structured strategy to outline and handle your one-time product choices.
Introducing the brand new mannequin
We’re introducing a brand new three-level hierarchy for outlining and managing one-time merchandise. This new construction builds upon ideas already acquainted from our subscription mannequin and aligns the taxonomy for your entire in-app product choices on Play.
- One-time product: This object defines what the consumer is shopping for. Consider it because the core merchandise in your catalog, comparable to a “Diamond sword”, “Cash” or “No advertisements”.
- Buy choice: This defines how the entitlement is granted to the consumer, its value, and the place the product will probably be obtainable. A single one-time product can have a number of buy choices representing other ways to amass it, comparable to shopping for it or renting it for a set time period. Buy choices now have two distinct sorts: purchase and hire.
- Provide: Gives additional modify a purchase order choice and can be utilized to mannequin reductions or pre-orders. A single buy choice can have a number of presents related to it.
This permits for a extra organized and environment friendly strategy to handle your catalog. As an illustration, you may have one “Diamond sword” product and provide it with a “Purchase” buy choice within the US for $10 and a “Hire” buy choice within the UK for £5. This new taxonomy can even permit Play to higher perceive what {the catalogue} means, serving to builders to additional amplify their affect in Play surfaces.
Extra flexibility to achieve extra customers
The brand new mannequin unlocks important flexibility that will help you attain a wider viewers and cater to completely different consumer preferences.
- Promote in a number of methods: As soon as you’ve got migrated to PBL 8, you may arrange other ways of promoting the identical product. This reduces the complexity of managing quite a few particular person merchandise for barely completely different situations.
- Introducing leases: We’re introducing the flexibility to configure objects which are bought as leases. Customers have entry to the merchandise for a set length of time. You’ll be able to outline the rental interval, which is the period of time a consumer has the entitlement after finishing the acquisition, and an non-obligatory expiration interval, which is the time after beginning consumption earlier than the entitlement is revoked.
- Pre-order capabilities: Now you can arrange one-time merchandise to be purchased earlier than their launch via pre-order presents. You’ll be able to configure the beginning date, finish date, and the discharge date for these presents, and even embody a reduction. Customers who pre-order comply with pay on the discharge date until they cancel beforehand.
- No default value: we’ll take away the idea of default value for a product. Now you may set and handle the costs in bulk or individually for every area.
- Regional pricing and availability: Value modifications can now be utilized to buy choices and presents, permitting you to set completely different costs in several areas. Moreover, you may as well configure the regional availability for each buy choices and presents. This performance is offered for paid apps along with one-time merchandise.
- Gives for promotions: Leverage presents to create varied promotions, comparable to reductions in your base buy value or particular circumstances for early entry via pre-orders.
To make use of these new options you first must improve to PBL 8.0. Then, you will must make the most of the brand new monetization.onetimeproducts service of the Play Developer API or use the Play Developer Console. You may additionally must combine with the queryProductDetailsAsync API to make the most of these new capabilities. And whereas querySkuDetailsAsync and inappproducts service are usually not supported with the brand new mannequin, they’ll proceed to be supported so long as PBL 7 is supported.
Necessary issues
- With this alteration, we’ll provide a backwards suitable strategy to port your present SKUs into this new mannequin. The migration will occur otherwise relying on the way you resolve to work together together with your catalogue the primary time you modify the metadata for a number of merchandise.
- New merchandise created via Play Console UI are normalized. And merchandise created or managed with the present inappproducts service will not help these new options. To entry them, you will must convert present ones within the Play Developer Console UI. As soon as transformed, a product can solely be managed via the brand new Play Developer API or Play Developer Console. Merchandise created via the brand new monetization.onetimeproducts service or via the Play Developer Console are already transformed.
- Purchase buy choices marked as ‘Backwards suitable’ will probably be returned as response for calls via querySkuDetailsAsync API. At launch, all present merchandise have a backwards suitable buy choice.
- On the time of this publish, the pre-orders functionality is offered via the Early Entry Program (EAP) solely. If you’re , please sign-up.
- One-time merchandise will probably be mirrored within the earnings studies at launch (Base plan ID and Provide ID columns will probably be populated for newly configured one-time merchandise). To minimise the potential for breaking modifications, we will probably be updating these column names within the earnings studies later this yr.
We encourage you to discover the brand new Play Developer API and the up to date Play Console interface to see how this enhanced flexibility may help you higher handle your catalog and develop your small business.
We’re excited to see the way you leverage these new instruments to attach together with your customers in modern methods.
