Making it even easier to monetize your games

By Peng Ying, Developer Advocate

(Cross-posted on the Google Commerce Blog)

As any merchant knows, the easier the path to purchase, the more likely the sale. That’s why the In-App Payments team is dedicated to developing a simple, yet intuitive API that makes the in-app purchase experience effortless for your customers -- leading to a higher conversion rate for you. Over the last few weeks, we’ve made some improvements to the API that we wanted to share:

Additional Currencies Accepted
With the recent international expansion of In-App Payments, we’ve expanded the types of currencies accepted so you can sell your goods in your customer’s native currency. If you’ve set up shop in the United Kingdom but your customer base is mostly in Japan, you can specify prices for your good in Japanese Yen and Google automatically handles currency conversion for you.

As of today, the supported currencies for In-App Payments are:

To use a different buyer currency, just specify the currency code in the JWT request:

   "request" => {
      "name" => "Piece of Cake",
      "description" => "Virtual chocolate cake to fill your virtual tummy",
      "price" => "1000",
      "currencyCode" => "JPY",
      "sellerData" => "user_id:1224245,offer_code:3098576987,affiliate:aksdfbovu9j"
   }



Card Details Minimized
In order to purchase through In-App Payments customers must first create a Google Wallet account, but entering payment information can be cumbersome. So, we’ve cut the amount of information that your customer has to enter when adding a new credit card to their Google Wallet. Now customers in many countries only need to specify their postal code instead of a full address, making the experience of creating or updating a Google Wallet quick and painless.

Terms of Service in Context
We’ve incorporated the Terms of Service into the purchase confirmation page to reduce the number of pages a new Google Wallet user sees before completing a purchase. This means that your new customers can easily review the Terms of Service and get to enjoying their items faster.






If you have any questions about Google In-App Payments, please reach out to us in the forum. We’ll also be hosting a regularly scheduled Google+ Hangout the first and third Thursday of every month at 9 a.m. PST to answer any technical questions about implementation of the API or about these new updates.

Stay tuned as we have plenty of new features to be released in 2012. Happy monetizing!


Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor