Posted by Laura Nechita – Product Supervisor, Google Play and Rejane França – Group Product Supervisor, Google Play

Beginning in the present day, Google Play is revamping the best way builders can handle one time merchandise, offering larger flexibility and new methods to promote. Play has frequently enhanced the methods builders can attain patrons 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 referred to as in-app merchandise, one-time product purchases are an important method for builders to monetize on Google Play. As this enterprise mannequin continues to evolve, we have heard from lots 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 enterprise. 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 affords. 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 observed some adjustments as we introduce this new mannequin, which offers 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 all your 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, corresponding to a “Diamond sword”, “Cash” or “No adverts”.
• Buy choice: This defines how the entitlement is granted to the consumer, its worth, and the place the product might be obtainable. A single one-time product can have a number of buy choices representing other ways to amass it, corresponding to shopping for it or renting it for a set time frame. Buy choices now have two distinct varieties: 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 affords related to it.

This permits for a extra organized and environment friendly strategy to handle your catalog. For example, 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 enable Play to raised perceive what {the catalogue} means, serving to builders to additional amplify their affect in Play surfaces.

Extra flexibility to succeed in extra customers

The brand new mannequin unlocks important flexibility that will help you attain a wider viewers and cater to totally 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 totally different eventualities.
• Introducing leases: We’re introducing the power to configure objects which are bought as leases. Customers have entry to the merchandise for a set length of time. You may outline the rental interval, which is the period of time a consumer has the entitlement after finishing the acquisition, and an elective 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 by pre-order affords. You may configure the beginning date, finish date, and the discharge date for these affords, and even embody a reduction. Customers who pre-order conform to pay on the discharge date except they cancel beforehand.
• No default worth: we are going to take away the idea of default worth for a product. Now you may set and handle the costs in bulk or individually for every area.
• Regional pricing and availability: Worth adjustments can now be utilized to buy choices and affords, permitting you to set totally different costs in numerous areas. Moreover, you can too configure the regional availability for each buy choices and affords. This performance is accessible for paid apps along with one-time merchandise.
• Gives for promotions: Leverage affords to create varied promotions, corresponding to reductions in your base buy worth or particular situations for early entry by 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 will additionally must combine with the queryProductDetailsAsync API to make the most of these new capabilities. And whereas querySkuDetailsAsync and inappproducts service aren’t supported with the brand new mannequin, they’ll proceed to be supported so long as PBL 7 is supported.

Vital issues

• With this modification, we are going to provide a backwards appropriate strategy to port your present SKUs into this new mannequin. The migration will occur in another way relying on the way you determine to work together together with your catalogue the primary time you alter the metadata for a number of merchandise.
• New merchandise created by Play Console UI are normalized. And merchandise created or managed with the prevailing 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 by the brand new Play Developer API or Play Developer Console. Merchandise created by the brand new monetization.onetimeproducts service or by the Play Developer Console are already transformed.
• Purchase buy choices marked as ‘Backwards appropriate’ might be returned as response for calls by querySkuDetailsAsync API. At launch, all present merchandise have a backwards appropriate buy choice.
• On the time of this submit, the pre-orders functionality is accessible by the Early Entry Program (EAP) solely. In case you are , please sign-up.
• One-time merchandise might be mirrored within the earnings stories at launch (Base plan ID and Provide ID columns might be populated for newly configured one-time merchandise). To minimise the potential for breaking adjustments, we might be updating these column names within the earnings stories later this 12 months.

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 will help you higher handle your catalog and develop your enterprise.

We’re excited to see the way you leverage these new instruments to attach together with your customers in progressive methods.