Hello,
I am making an e-commerce app. We plan to charge user's to make a listing for 15% of the sale price capped at £35, and are trying to figure out if we need to use IAP?
From what I can find, other companies in the same area don't use them - for example Autotrader takes you off their app to there website when you try to make a listing, and you pay for the listing there.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
The essential question is whether the paid-for service is delivered in the app.
Examples: a supermarket app where you pay for physical groceries to be delivered to your door does not have to use IAP. A game where you buy weapons that your in-game character uses does have to use IAP.
There are of course some grey areas and I don't know most of the rules. Autotrader is interesting. If it were still just a paper magazine, I would say that the advert you pay for is clearly delivered outside the app. But I guess that now they have an app where the listings appear. So I don't know what's going on there.
If you want to describe your business model in more detail, someone might have some advice. But you are probably best off reading the rules yourself. They are not completely incomprehensible.
Thanks for the response, I really appreciate you taking the time. I think the rule which is relevant to us is:
3.1.3(e) Goods and Services Outside of the App: If your app enables people to purchase physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app, you must use purchase methods other than in-app purchase to collect those payments, such as Apple Pay or traditional credit card entry.
so this suggests that if you are just ”enabling“ the purchase of physical goods, you should not use IAP?
For some more context about our business model: we have a few categories you can post in, all related to physical goods. For example cars, holiday homes, tickets to events, etc. When a user creates a post, we will review it, and if it is approved we will charge the user 15% of the price they have listed the item capped at £35. Tickets is an exception, where we will only charge the user when the item is sold.