>10,000 In-app purchase SKU's

Hi there,


I'm working on building out in-app purchase for a large (>1,000,000 items) catalog of products. My original approach was to create an individual in-app purchase item in itunes connect for each individual SKU because each items pricing could be different but discovered there is a limit of 10,000 items. Anyone have an approach they've taken that would eliminate the need for creating an entry for each product?

Thanks in advance,


Mark

Replies

You create a few consumable products called 'tokens' - e.g. 100 for $50; 10 for $8; 1 for $1. These can all be bought in any quantity the user wants. The user can then exchange a certain number of 'tokens' for any particular item in your catalog of products - each with its own price in 'tokens'. Your app is responsible for keeping track of the tokens the user has purchased.


You will need to create a system that allows the user to 'restore' a purchase to a new device since your products are really non-consumable IAPs. You can use the iCloud key-value file to record the purchase and 'restore' it to other devices owned by that user. A note to App Review may help them understand how you are handling 'restore' function.


For security you could learn how to 'sign' a file using a 'salted hash' of its contents.

Hi, i would like to understand the same. We’re working on an app that has exceeded the max number of the Non-Consumable SKUs (we noticed 40.000 SKU not 10.000). The problem now is that we need to remove old SKUs to free the space for the new ones and this process is really slow and it is impossible to work in this way, considering that we upload hundreds of SKUs each month. Our SKUs, like those of the OT should be, are non-consumable because are daily magazines, and we read from other user that moving this type of product from non-consumable to consumable causes an app rejection. @PBK Are you sure that just a note to the App Store Review Team on how we can “re-implement” the restorePurchase will be enough to use consumable products in this way? Can I ask if you already have/know something app that uses a logic like this in AppStore? Thanks.

>Our SKUs.... are daily magazines


This is what autorenewable subscriptions are meant to handle. Consider whether they will fit your business model.


>@PBK Are you sure that....... ?

It doesn't matter what I 'am sure of' because only App Review makes the decisions and nothing anyone writes on this forum can be taken as a guarantee one way or another - it's all IMHO.


>....already have/know something app that uses a logic like this in AppStore?

And again, what other apps have 'gotten away with' doesn't matter - each review is de novo.

Ok thanks a lot for the clarification about the review. For “daily magazines” i meant that a user can buy just one daily copy of the magazine and not a autorenewable subscription. We already have subscriptions but i’m just talking about non-consumable products. We sell a lot of daily in-app purchase but now we can’t handle anymore the process of deleting/loading a lot of new SKUs every time. I want to ensure that changing the non-consumable to consumable iaps, using the “tokens” logic you exaplained, will be approved by reviewers. I know that each reviewer could use different metrics to review the iap products, but for us now it’s difficult to apply this change if the new products will be rejected.