Retrieving in app purchase info from the customer's Apple Receipt email

Hello,


We have customers who bought consumable in app purchase in our game, then lost their phone and purchased a new phone. They need our help to restore their progress on the new phone. They send us their purchase receipt email (sent by Apple), reasonably expecting that we can use it to find their old account and restore it on their new phone.


However I see no way to associate any information from the apple purchase receipt (such as order id), to the purchase info received by the in app purchase validation service (which contains unique transaction IDs). The email receipt doesn't even have a timestamp. Even the date displayed on the receipt is usually a few days after the actual purchase happened.


Is there any way we can help such customers? Very often, the purchase info is the only info we have to rely on to locate their old account.


If there's nothing to be done for past purchases, is there anything we can do going forward? It would be great to be able to associate our own custom data (i.e. player ID) with the order ID or any other info displayed on the customer receipt email.

Replies

Nope, there is no way you can associate the two.

In your app you could ask the user to enter their email address into the app - then you can do it easily. But what for? Very few users lose their phone. Also, let's be real here. A new phone is $600. How much is a consumable IAP. Tell the customer there is nothing you can do - or....


Create a backdoor method of crediting an IAP for this purpose. Trust the user and push the IAP into their phone. A back door can be constructed by having the device generate an ID, have the user email that ID to you from within the app, post that ID number to your website and have the app check your website for the number.

Post not yet marked as solved Up vote reply of PBK Down vote reply of PBK

Just chirping in to this thread, as the problem is very, very real, and we stumble upon it all the time.


User forwards us the receipt email, containing

  • Date;
  • Order number;
  • Document number;
  • Purchasses he made;
  • Price.


Inquries are regarding different questions, sometimes they claim they have bought product in the app, but didn't get it. We would gladly help the user to give the product manually in case something indeed didn't work. Correct me if I'm wrong but to our knowledge there is no way of looking up the information about speciffic order by providing the order id.


As the thread starter mentioned, connecting orderID to transactionID would help, as we do log transactionID in our system, because this is what we get form In-App purchase API.


Can anyone shed light on how are you handling these cases, or how are they supposed to be handled.

+1 same issue. Is there any news?

Got the same question!

Same issue here. Is there a way to associate user id / email with transaction id ?
Anyone Got any Info regarding retrieving User Transaction ID from Receipts.
On a new iOS device or after the app reinstall you as app's developer can let users to "restore" their purchases. See more info here https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/in-app_purchase/restoring_purchased_products

Anyone got any Info for this? Still having the same problem.

Hi,

Get orderId from customer(from app store recipt sent to email) and user order id to get transaction id from app store connect look_up_order_id api..(https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appstoreserverapi/look_up_order_id)