The increased adoption of mobile devices and improved internet coverage continues to fuel the growth of businesses embracing online marketplaces via the web and more recently mobile applications. This strategy enables businesses to maintain a presence across multiple platforms and drive growth by catering to a global customer base.
The increasing popularity of mobile apps has led to the discovery of a new customer base and offers a revenue stream with immense potential. However, these apps are hosted on an online marketplace platform and currently requires that manage the complete subscription cycle exclusively on their platforms leading to fragmented silos.
While you do have standalone solutions to manage your in-app purchases and recurring billing, these can hardly match the complexities associated with businesses hosted on multiple platforms. To mitigate these complexities, you require a solution that helps manage your business effectively and also offers feature capabilities that help you scale your business too.
Chargebee's Mobile Subscriptions feature is designed to unify the subscription management data into Chargebee by allowing you to connect your mobile app businesses with your Chargebee site. This solution empowers you with the following benefits:
Track subscription data across multiple platforms: Our integration solution offers you a 'single source of truth' via a dashboard for all your subscription data across platforms.
Keep in-app subscription data in sync and updated: As subscription events occur in the mobile app stores, they will be synced over to your Chargebee site.
Comprehensive Business Analytics: The fragmented revenue data across multiple platforms makes analysis cumbersome and error-prone. Our consolidated approach to subscription data across platforms helps you create a revenue story that is accurate and insightful.
Integrate your Apple and Google apps with Chargebee by accessing mobile app stores in the marketplace .
The following are the key points that will help you understand Apple App Store and Google Play Store integrations in Chargebee.
It is recommended to go through these points before setting up the integration.
The following are the points to know about Apple App Store and Google Play Store integration in general.
Apple App Store or Google Play Store refers to subscription plans as in-app subscription products within their documentation. So both terms plans and products are used in this section.
The following are the points to know about Apple App Store and Google Play Store plans or products.
retrieveProductIdentifers
SDK method to retrieve Apple or Google product IDs from Chargebee.purchaseProduct
SDK method(Apple / Google ) to create in-app subscriptions in Chargebee without importing Apple or Google products. In such a case, plans are going to auto-create in Chargebee with the price and currency information available with the API or SDK method.The following are limitations for integrating the Apple App Store or Google Play Store with Chargebee.
Chargebee does not support multiple apps integration to a single Chargebee site using the admin user interface though this is possible using backend measures. If you have such requirements please reach out to support .
Apple App Store or Google Play Store integrations cannot be enabled for your Chargebee site if the Multi Business Entity feature is enabled for the same.
A subscription product or plan configured in Apple App Store or Google Play Store is available for all regions by default. So the same subscription product can be available with different price-points but the same currency for two or more regions. In Chargebee, plans are not created based on the region, you'll be able to import the plan with only one price per currency. However, this will not impact subscriptions because we will override the plan's price while creating a subscription, thus subscription will be created based on the price that is relevant for the region.
For example, consider Apple App Store's plan price in
Now you can either import the plan to Chargebee with a $9.99 or an $11.99 USD price. Assume you have imported a plan with a $9.99 USD price to Chargebee. Now when a subscriber is from the United States region then the subscription will be created at a $9.99 USD price and if the subscriber is from Albania or Belarus region then the subscription will be created at an $11.99 USD price and both these subscriptions will be associated with the $9.99 price plan.
In the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, there is a provision to associate free trials, introductory offers, promotional offers, and coupon codes for subscription products. Currently, Chargebee only supports the free trial period with subscriptions in Chargebee. Therefore, we recommend refraining from associating in-app subscriptions with an introductory offer, promotional offer, or coupon code to Chargebee, as this will result in erroneous requests.
Currently, Chargebee only supports in-app subscriptions. Therefore, if you have configured one-time purchase plans in stores like consumable, non-consumable, and non-renewing subscription products then these purchases cannot be synced to Chargebee.
Our SDKs are available for iOS , Android , and Flutter platforms if you are planning to use client SDKs for integration. Currently, we don't support in-app subscriptions on our React Native solution. So if your app is built on React Native or any other platform then either you need to write a wrapper around our Native SDKs or use Process Purchase Command API to create in-app subscriptions in Chargebee.
You will not be able to import Apple App Store and Google Play Store plans from the Chargebee admin user interface if your Chargebee site is integrated with tax software like Avalara or Taxjar. In such a case, to import your store plans, reach out to support .
Since Apple App Store and Google Play Store generate invoices for your customers directly and don't share the invoice copy with us, we generate read-only invoices in Chargebee based on the total amount that was paid by your customer. You cannot download or email these invoices to your customers.
For any successful subscription to Apple App Store or Google Play Store, Chargebee gets a receipt that has only the total payment information. Since these receipts don't have information on the commission percentage charged by the store and the tax deduction amount, we report the total amount paid by your customer in the Invoices and RevenueStory .