Issue: The App Store continues to display a non-existent Product ID/price and description for my App. I have opened a ticket and despite the back and forth over several days there has been no resolution or guidance how to get it sorted.
I have been constantly checking the App Store to see if it'll update the App price but that has not happened.
If the In App Purchase section in the App Store is expanded it correctly only lists the subscription options in Apple Store Connect so there is a glaring disconnect between the download button and the options open to potential users.
For clarification the app used to have the In-App Purchase Non Consumable displayed which has since been Removed From Sale and then Deleted over 5 days now.
I would be very grateful if any help/guidance can be offered.
At the moment I am stuck and cannot promote the app because the App Store shows a wrong price and downloaders are going to get confused and be angry if they get billed the wrong amount.
Thank you.
I figured out what was going on and putting this here in case it helps anyone else in the future worried why they were seeing wrong prices for their App.
In my case, there were two factors
First:
I had filled in the Pricing and Availability (P&A) section in App Store Connect , that was in addition to In-App Purchases (which I subsequently deleted i.e. the 'NonExistent Product' in the Post Title) and also filled in Subscriptions. I assumed the Store Listing button took its price from IAP. Wrong. It takes its price from P&A. Finding this out was thanks to AI/LLM. An hour after deleting the P&A price I started seeing the correct price in the Store, but inconsistently, sometimes correct, sometimes wrong.
Second:
The inconsistency was apparent when checking the direct link to the App in a web browser. For one, I hadn't noticed the URL included the two-character country code e.g. /us/ or /gb/ etc for the country storefront. The prices for my six storefronts differed, half might have the correct price while the other half displayed the deleted P&A price.
Even more interesting was checking the storefronts a couple of hours apart, a storefront which displayed the correct price before might now display the wrong price and vice versa!
I then started inspecting the HTTP Response Headers and soon saw what was going on. What was being returned was a cached version of the App Store data by whatever Content Delivery Network (CDN) happened to be handling my request. If the CDN had the current price I got that, if it was a different CDN this time around and if it had the old incorrect price then that's what I got.
It's a bit more complicated as a Cache MISS on the CDN or if the cache time had expired meant the CDN went back and queried Apple's Backend Servers. Turned out there were two of these with one Apple server consistently returning the correct price and the second server, the incorrect price. They were clearly not in sync.
So web queries were at the mercy of (i) whichever CDN picked up the query and (ii) which Apple Server they went back to to fetch the data. The solution of course is to just wait it out until all Apple's servers are up to date.