Posted by Laura Nechita – Product Supervisor, Google Play and Rejane França – Group Product Supervisor, Google Play
Beginning at this time, Google Play is revamping the way in which builders can handle one time merchandise, offering larger flexibility and new methods to promote. Play has regularly enhanced the methods builders can attain consumers by serving to you to diversify the way in which you’ll be able to promote merchandise.
Beginning in 2022, we created extra flexibility for subscriptions and a brand new Console interface. And now, we’re bringing the identical flexibility to one-time merchandise, aligning the taxonomy for our one-time merchandise. Beforehand generally known as in-app merchandise, one-time product purchases are a significant manner for builders to monetize on Google Play. As this enterprise mannequin continues to evolve, we have heard from lots of you that you just want extra flexibility and fewer complexity in the way you supply these digital merchandise.
To deal with these wants, we’re launching new capabilities and a brand new mind-set about your merchandise that may enable you develop your small business. At its core, we have separated what the product is from the way you promote it. For every one-time product, now you can configure a number of buy choices and presents. This lets you promote the identical product in a number of methods, decreasing operational prices by eradicating the necessity to create and handle an ever-increasing variety of catalog objects.
You might need already observed some modifications as we introduce this new mannequin, which offers a extra structured solution to outline and handle your one-time product choices.
Introducing the brand new mannequin

We’re introducing a brand new three-level hierarchy for outlining and managing one-time merchandise. This new construction builds upon ideas already acquainted from our subscription mannequin and aligns the taxonomy for your whole in-app product choices on Play.
- One-time product: This object defines what the consumer is shopping for. Consider it because the core merchandise in your catalog, similar to a “Diamond sword”, “Cash” or “No advertisements”.
- Buy possibility: This defines how the entitlement is granted to the consumer, its value, and the place the product can be out there. A single one-time product can have a number of buy choices representing other ways to accumulate it, similar to shopping for it or renting it for a set time frame. Buy choices now have two distinct sorts: purchase and hire.
- Provide: Affords additional modify a purchase order possibility and can be utilized to mannequin reductions or pre-orders. A single buy possibility can have a number of presents related to it.
This permits for a extra organized and environment friendly solution to handle your catalog. As an illustration, you’ll be able to have one “Diamond sword” product and supply it with a “Purchase” buy possibility within the US for $10 and a “Lease” buy possibility within the UK for £5. This new taxonomy can even permit Play to higher perceive what {the catalogue} means, serving to builders to additional amplify their influence in Play surfaces.
Extra flexibility to achieve extra customers
The brand new mannequin unlocks important flexibility that can assist you attain a wider viewers and cater to totally different consumer preferences.
- Promote in a number of methods: As soon as you have migrated to PBL 8, you’ll be able to arrange other ways of promoting the identical product. This reduces the complexity of managing quite a few particular person merchandise for barely totally different situations.
- Introducing leases: We’re introducing the power to configure objects which might be offered as leases. Customers have entry to the merchandise for a set length of time. You’ll be able to outline the rental interval, which is the period of time a consumer has the entitlement after finishing the acquisition, and an non-compulsory expiration interval, which is the time after beginning consumption earlier than the entitlement is revoked.
- Pre-order capabilities: Now you can arrange one-time merchandise to be purchased earlier than their launch by way of pre-order presents. You’ll be able to configure the beginning date, finish date, and the discharge date for these presents, and even embody a reduction. Customers who pre-order comply with pay on the discharge date until they cancel beforehand.
- No default value: we are going to take away the idea of default value for a product. Now you’ll be able to set and handle the costs in bulk or individually for every area.
- Regional pricing and availability: Value modifications can now be utilized to buy choices and presents, permitting you to set totally different costs in several areas. Moreover, you can even configure the regional availability for each buy choices and presents. This performance is obtainable for paid apps along with one-time merchandise.
- Affords for promotions: Leverage presents to create numerous promotions, similar to reductions in your base buy value or particular circumstances for early entry by way of pre-orders.
To make use of these new options you first have to improve to PBL 8.0. Then, you may have to make the most of the brand new monetization.onetimeproducts service of the Play Developer API or use the Play Developer Console. You will additionally have to combine with the queryProductDetailsAsync API to make the most of these new capabilities. And whereas querySkuDetailsAsync and inappproducts service will not be supported with the brand new mannequin, they may proceed to be supported so long as PBL 7 is supported.
Necessary issues
- With this modification, we are going to supply a backwards appropriate solution to port your present SKUs into this new mannequin. The migration will occur otherwise relying on the way you determine to work together along with your catalogue the primary time you modify the metadata for a number of merchandise.
- New merchandise created by way of Play Console UI are normalized. And merchandise created or managed with the prevailing inappproducts service will not assist these new options. To entry them, you may have to convert present ones within the Play Developer Console UI. As soon as transformed, a product can solely be managed by way of the brand new Play Developer API or Play Developer Console. Merchandise created by way of the brand new monetization.onetimeproducts service or by way of the Play Developer Console are already transformed.
- Purchase buy choices marked as ‘Backwards appropriate’ can be returned as response for calls by way of querySkuDetailsAsync API. At launch, all present merchandise have a backwards appropriate buy possibility.
- On the time of this submit, the pre-orders functionality is obtainable by way of the Early Entry Program (EAP) solely. If you’re , please sign-up.
- One-time merchandise can be mirrored within the earnings stories at launch (Base plan ID and Provide ID columns can be populated for newly configured one-time merchandise). To minimise the potential for breaking modifications, we can be updating these column names within the earnings stories later this yr.
We encourage you to discover the brand new Play Developer API and the up to date Play Console interface to see how this enhanced flexibility can assist you higher handle your catalog and develop your small business.
We’re excited to see the way you leverage these new instruments to attach along with your customers in progressive methods.
