In-App Purchase for multiple products

Hi,

I want to monetise my app and integrate a payment method. My app is an Educational App which has different authors who create content and sell their courses through our app. Authors can create courses/channels to which users can subscribe. The courses can be purchased one time or on a monthly subscription basis. (Currently, all the courses are free)

Since Apple doesn't allow the use of third-party payments, I only have the option of integrating Apple In-App Purchase. As hundreds of channels/courses are already there in the system and it's growing continuously, I don't know how to implement the In-App purchases in this case.

If I am not wrong, Apple In-App Purchase requires to create In-App Purchase products(consumable and non-consumable) first from the App Store Connect and I am afraid that it isn't feasible to manage such a large quantity of products because Authors can add any number of courses and it's up to them to decide the courses' prices and whether it's a one-time payment or subscription-based courses.

Please guide me to solve this problem or suggest a correct approach.

Thank you.

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user725626
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  • Hello, I am wondering if you finally find the best way to solve this issue. We have a similar requirement and we still don't find the right way. Any advice will be more than welcome! Thanks!

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    Nico_Tarabot1
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The app store connect API now allows you to create and modify IAPs programatically. So you can manage your own database of products, and automate the process of adding new ones to App Store Connect.

I think there is a limit of 10,000 IAPs per app. But beware that very few apps have large numbers of IAPs so it's not unusual to discover bugs....

Of course the IAPs still have to be approved by Apple.

I have an app with about 1,000 IAPs. In practice, if I submit a large batch of new IAPs Apple seem to test one of them, always the most expensive. It doesn't take a long time for the IAPs to be reviewed. (Mine are not subscriptions.)

Your alternative is to sell "credits" and to manage the store yourself. This requires that your users have accounts with you, and you track which user has purchased which product on your server.

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endecotp
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Today your best scalable approach is to use a hybrid approach of generic products and specific products.

For generic products this means you create a set of generic products for each of your product type and price points. Then at the time of purchase you dynamically assign a generic product to a product on your end. This means you would handle mapping of your catalog to the generic product used at time of purchase.

Fro the specific products, use these only for your high volume products. This hybrid approach minimizes the number of products needed, minimizes generic product experience and mappings, and maximize use of specific products.

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App Store Commerce Engineer
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