How to implement consumable products in windows store app?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12845304

Question

Is it possible to sell consumable products via in-app purchase?

Was it helpful?

Solution

The answer is no, but it is also yes.

Consumables, specifically are not supported. That is any in-app purchase you can make again and again and again and again. They are not supported.

However, durables (that you can purchase one time) can be set to expire in a single day. Many developers have created multiple durables, allowed them to be purchased in a day, kept a central record of their purchase somewhere, and let them expire so the user can purchase them again tomorrow.

So, no, you cannot set consumables.

And, yes, you can set expiring durables and act like daily consumables.

OTHER TIPS

Just to add my 2 cents to the answers:

  1. There is a limit on the number of IAPs on Windows 8, and it is 200 (but has been removed in Windows 8.1). This might seem like plenty, but an app can easily have 10 or 20 different IAPs, which divides that number down to 10 purchases in 24h, which seems like a limit some users could very likely hit soon. To add two more complex ideas of a solution to this:

    • You could use analytics to get the maximum number of each in-app item users purchased in a 24h window and adjust the number of each IAP products per in-app item accordingly, i.e. assign more IAP products to most used in-app items, and less to items that are not purchased so many times in 24h.
    • You could have IAP products assigned to price tiers, i.e. define 50 products for $1.49 priced in-app items, 25 for $1.99 and so on..

  2. For completeness, I'd like to quote @Chris Bowen's link to the workaround debate:

If the games are being XBL enabled they will have to use the built-in Consumables solution.

The XBox Live, though, in my experience, is a very closed program.

Consumables (e.g. buy a pack of gold coins for your character in the game, and allow the user to buy that pack multiple times) are not directly supported for Windows Store apps (though the Windows Phone SDK has ProductLicense.IsConsumable), but there is a type of workaround that you may find helpful, depending on the specific scenario.

However, support for in-app purchases of multiple different products is relatively simple to implement, shown in this article and sample:

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