Making Outsourcing Work

• 02
• January

Alternative to in-app purchase on iPhone?

Back in the beginning of 2011 Apple had rejected Sony’s app that was selling music around in-app purchase. Since that time the hot question was: is there any way to sell products from your app without giving Apple 30% cut? Another question: can hard goods be sold within the app? With the latest PayPal SDK for iPhone both question can be positively resolved.

PayPal had released native SDK kits for several mobile platforms (including iOS, Android and Blackberry). They allow to seamlessly integrate the payment gateway into your app. There are several several specialties to this solution:

1. PayPal requires approval process before the app can be submitted to the appstore.

2. End users can only pay with their PayPal account, not credit card. That’s a major bummer.

3. One big advantage of PayPal’s integration is that it allows to pay for hard goods (in-app purchase only allows to sell non-physical goods). We released an app several months ago that sold custom made jewelry via PayPal integration and it got approved both by PayPal and Apple. The only other way to sell hard goods from the app I know is redirecting the user into mobile browser where the purchase order can be processed.

Official documentation for this solution can be found here.