Receipt verification for Refunded Consumables

Hey there,


We are currently looking into updating our receipt validation to include a better way to verify if a user refunded a consumable purchase. I've read several posts here that users are looking for ways on how to do this with no success.


We have a use case that users are buying IAP and using the product infering costs to us and then refunding the purchase. This cost is significant enough that we are always looking into new ways to identify users that do this.


I would like to figure out if there is a way to use the origina receipt received from the Consumable IAP and validate it server-side with Apple to see if a user has performed a refund. There is also the way that is currently implemented for subscription cancellations that we can get a callback when the user performs a cancellation so that we can know and perform tasks our side.


Is there a way to know if the receipts come from a single apple account, either by name, by unique id or anything that we can use to know if a single Apple account is purchasing, and refunding, across several of our accounts. This is only relevant since I do not know of a way to get the information of a refunded receipt. I'm going to assume its not possible so my next question is, is there a way to store the receipts and validated them server side continuously without having to hope the application sends us a new receipt with the refund state? Does it even contain the refund status?


Any help or direction would be appreciated,

Eric

Replies

You cannot detect a refund of the purchase of a consumable IAP. But Apple rarely grants such a refund and even rarer than the granting of such a refund is the user who, having been granted the refund goes on to use, or to have used, the consumable IAP.

Thanks for the reply!


We're getting a large amount of refunds given by Apple on our system so it's definitely not rare. We have about 4% of purchases being refunded in our case and we do not know, based on the receipt, which user refunds and continues to use the app. Using other methods of finding which users do this, we can say that we have a above 0% amount of users that perform refunds and continue to use the app. I don't really understand the issue with telling us a Yes/No when we do a receipt check so that we can perform checks and validate the actual amount of users abusing the system, especially since the developer has to take the hit on the refunded price.


So are you saying there is 100% no way of verifying if a receipt has been refunded?


Eric

You can file a feature engancement request through the big reporting system.


I beleive the receipt for a consumable is not retained by the system so there is no easy way to modify it and return it to the device.