Android In-App purchases with extra infomation

Question

I ask this question expecting the answer to be 'not possible', as I have attempted to research this already and found no fruit! I thought that I would give the community a chance to weigh in however.

I have a working in-app billing system, but what I want is to be able to provide a little extra bit of infomation with the billing request. Something that would show up in my market place stats.

My users have the option of buying several different levels of product (sort of a Base, Premium and Gold-Star sort of thing). When they purchase the product they provide me with a string that represents the specific thing they want the product about (such as the house number and postcode if the product was about a house).

What I want is to be able to see that extra bit of information in my market place reports, so when I see someone who has requested a refund I can see on what exact item they purchased the product. I have looked at the DEVELOPER_PAYLOAD but I don't think that it will do what I want.

If I can't find a solution this way then I will end up performing a service call and storing the data myself, but I thought I would ask you guys first!

Sorry for being vague about my app and the products it returns but I don't want to expose my app yet (plus it holds no bearing on the question!).

EDIT

Now that I have added a bounty I would like to limit the answers. As I mentioned in my original question my backup plan will me a service call to my system registering the google reference and "data packet" for the purchase.

What I am most interested in is a way to do this where my information would end up in the my market place reports. For instance, if you were to offer a physical item with your in app purchase, how would a user record shipping instructions/etc. There is a place for this in the market reports, so surely there is a way to add the data?

Answer 1

You can certainly use DEVELOPER_PAYLOAD for this. However, Google doesn't process it in anyway and it won't show up in reports (not sure if they store it at all). So what you need to do is send transaction info (the JSON string you receive) to your own sever, parse it and store/process/whatever the developerPayload. You can combine this with signature verification and transaction reporting if you want to. One thing to beware of is that the size is limited to 512 bytes. If you send a request with a longer string, the whole transaction will fail, and the error message is not friendly at all ('IAB-DPTL' or some such).

Of course if you need more that this, you can simply build your own webservice and send whatever data you want. If it includes personal info, etc. make sure you let people know about it and/or they can turn it off.

Answer 2

In order to see this in the report, assuming you have a limited set of "dynamic" data, you would probably have to create a different set of in-app items per each "item" in your game. Then, of course, you let the game handle which list the user sees according to the "dynamic" data. That's the only way you would see it in the reports without your own web service handling it.

Answer 3

For those that may find this question via Google!

It seems that the easy answer to my question is NO. You can not add extra information to your market stats with regards to in app purchases.

As I mentioned in my question (and some answers said) the work around would be to upload the transaction string to your server and then compare it to market stats yourself (using the export function from the market perhaps).

I now intend to write a system to extract market stats (likely from the csv download feature) and match it up to the strings from the IAPs. If I ever get around to writing it I will share it with the community.