Handling refunds of an in-app purchase with iTunes - app-store

I work for a company offering in-app purchases. I am trying to have our purchase statistics alright after a user has obtained a refund for an in-app purchase with iTunes connect.
I have read the iTunes connect sales and trends guide (pdf) and know how to retrieve sales for a given period of time with the auto-ingestion tool provided.
Unfortunately, the report I get does not contain any field that would allow me to know precisely which purchase or user was refunded. I just know about the amount and Apple id, so here comes my question:
Is there a way to add custom fields when creating a new in-app purchase so that I could pass my order_id to be retrieved it in the sales report?
That is the only way I see to know exactly which purchase on our side was refunded.
Thank you in advance!

Related

How to get user payment details in iTunes on developer side?

I have recently submitted my app in Appstore with in-app-purchase feature,
it is work fine in live server but, some customer pay the payment in my IOS app not updated his profile in my server database,
Can i get User Payment details in my iTunes account on developer side for checking payment based on orderID.
If it is possible where i can get details in iTunes account or any other possibility.
Thanks for your help.
It's not possible to get any sales related data for us developers, like Apple ID, form of payment, Credit Card details etc.
Please clarify, what you want to do exactly.
The only thing you can do it "Receipt Validation", from within the app: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/releasenotes/General/ValidateAppStoreReceipt/Introduction.html

StoreKit on iOS - autorenewable subscription - How to know whether it is a free trial or not?

In iTunes Connect it is possible to give a free trial period for autorenewable subscriptions.
App > Manage In App Purchases > Subscription Basic > 1 Month > Offer a free trial?
How can I get this information on the client? SKProduct does not have any information about this as I can see. Since we're having a marketing campaign it is very confusing for the end user to not see information about the product has a trial period.
Of course it is possible to fetch this kind of information from a server I maintain, but then we'll have the overhead with updating both our server and iTunes Connect. So I don't accept this kind of answer unless it is wired up to retrieving that trial period information from Apple's services.
TLDR; It is not possible. You need to manage this information yourself.
When you process an SKPayment you get back a receipt. You should verify those receipts regularly for subscriptions (e.g. before downloading new content) as the user might have cancelled the subscription. When the user does cancel the subscription or the subscription expires you get back a descriptive error when verifying the purchase's receipt.
Moreover the receipt gives you all the information you need: for a given product you know which trial period you grant. Therefore when a purchase is made you could store the purchase date given from the purchase receipt in your model object or in the NSUserDefaults or in the Keychain alongside the purchase data. At this point you know when the trial is expired and verify that the subscription is still valid. If you can't you might want to disable access to the content until you're able to do so.
For more informations about purchase receipts and subscriptions check out the In-App Purchase Guide by Apple.
On the client side you usually identify the different products and characteristics by their product identifier as the App Store does not deliver certain information such as subscription period and free trial period.
So if your product ID is for example:
com.domain.app.product_paid1month_free7days you split the ID on the client side and know that the paid subscription duration is 1 month and the product has a free trial period of 7 days.
Of course one approach would be to transmit the product ID to your own server to get its characteristics as response. This way you can maintain the product list continuously without updating the binary and across versions.
SKProduct > introductoryPrice
Available since iOS 11.2
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/skproduct/2936878-introductoryprice?language=objc

Does the iphone app store provide instant payment notification to a url?

I'm considering posting an app to the iphone app store, but I'm curious before I start paying them for the priviledge of posting the app, whether they provide instant payment notification to a url?
Generally, I've used paypal in the past for applications where right after payment my web site is secretly notified of a purchase. I take this notification, with the users email address and product purchased, to send the purchaser information required for the application.
Is this possible with apple? With the iphone app store? What about the upcoming mac store?
thx
No. Apple handles all contact with the customer, including delivery of the app. At the end of each day, week and month they give you summaries of sales of each product in each country. It's nothing like selling with PayPal. The iOS and Mac App Store are exactly the same in this regard.
The nearest you can get is having your app connect to your server when it first runs, although if you're doing this for no other reason than to track your users, you'll have to check it's allowed under the developer agreement.
First, no, you do not receive instant notification. You can grab a daily report on the web the following early morning (in the US), you can use the free app that Apple provides to retrieve the information, or you can use a variety of third-party tools to do the same.
Second, you will never receive any information whatsoever about the people who buy your app, so no, you can't send purchasers anything.
The Mac App Store appears to use the exact same arrangements.
If you use in-app purchase, you can get an instant notification to your server for the in-app purchase, but not for the initial download of the app.
If you just place a paid app in Apple's App store, you get no direct sales or customer information of any kind, only after-the-fact daily and weekly sales trend estimates, and monthly sales reports a few weeks later. Then Apple then pays you 70% of what they reported up to 45 days after the monthly close. You don't pay them. They pay you. And with over 300K apps in their store, and no other store doing anywhere near as well, they need no privileges granted from any developer. It's more like take it or leave it.

iphone in-app purchase subscriptions products

I am making an in-app purchase application for bulk of quizzes. I have all the information, graphics and data set of quizzes on my server. I want user to purchase quizzes with in-app purchase and want to transfer all the related content of purchased item from my server to application.
Now, apple is asking me to submit binary while adding in-app purchase item. Is this compulsory? For all kind of products (Consumable, Nonconsumable & Subscriptions)?
What if I want to manage the contents(graphics, database for that quiz product) of the product on my server not on itunes connect?
Help would be appreciated.
Thanks.
You don't have to submit binaries. In fact, it's not even possible. In-app purchases only have a product ID, a description and a price.
Also, be aware that you can't send new application code to the device via your web server. Only data can be sent.

In-App Purchase without using iTunes Connect?

I have a website which sells a product to the user (downloadable). I am creating an iPhone app and want to be able to sell some of the products using the 3.0's in-app purchase.
Now the documentation mentions that anything you want to sell has to be uploaded to iTunes Connect and approved by Apple. But I want to be able to keep adding products to be sold by my app on a daily basis.
I have a web service to get the list of products from the website. Is it possible to include in-app purchase to let user buy this stuff from within the app but without having to add them to iTunes Connect?
As I understand it, no - all the things you want to sell via in-app purchase run through a vetting process similar to that of the apps themselves. Apple won't allow, for example, a "photo of the day" application if you can in-app purchase pornographic photos to be sent to you daily.
What you could probably do is submit your app with a backlog of in-app purchases, five or six days ahead of time, then consistently be submitting your daily items ahead of when you want them to be available. Not sure how reliable the review process is, or whether this will work for your situation - just a thought.
Nekin,
I think you have to use the type as consumable (in app purchase) product as each time the product has to be purchased. Once you purchase a book, then you can mark it as purchased in your local app database and that way the user need not buy the same book as you can check it in the local app database before connecting to the in app purchase payment request and this way the inapp purchase products can be dynamic and can use as many books but the list of books should be from your server.
You can keep updating the server data with more number of books.
Thanks,
Vijay