iPhone - in-app purchase to sell our products

Question

I have a website which sells a product to the user (downloadable). I am creating an iPhone app and want to be able to sell some of the products using the 3.0's in-app purchase.

Now the documentation mentions that anything you want to sell has to be uploaded to itunes connect and approved by Apple. But I want to be able to keep adding products to be sold by my app on a daily basis.

I have a web service to get the list of products from the website. Is it possible to include in-app purchase to let user buy this stuff from within the app but without having to add them to itunes connect?

Thanks

Answer 1

As I understand it, no - all the things you want to sell via in-app purchase run through a vetting process similar to that of the apps themselves. Apple won't allow, for example, a "photo of the day" application if you can in-app purchase pornographic photos to be sent to you daily.

What you could probably do is submit your app with a backlog of in-app purchases, five or six days ahead of time, then consistently be submitting your daily items ahead of when you want them to be available. Not sure how reliable the review process is, or whether this will work for your situation - just a thought.

Answer 2

Nekin,

I think you have to use the type as consumable (in app purchase) product as each time the product has to be purchased. Once you purchase a book, then you can mark it as purchased in your local app database and that way the user need not buy the same book as you can check it in the local app database before connecting to the in app purchase payment request and this way the inapp purchase products can be dynamic and can use as many books but the list of books should be from your server. You can keep updating the server data with more number of books.

Thanks, Vijay