Insights on in-app purchases
A few blog posts ago I wrote about the Guide concept I’m working on. I’ve already done quite a bit of work and things are looking good.
This week I’ve worked on the store where I will sell the guides. I’ve built IAP-stores for customers before and I was able to re-use most of that code to get my own store up and running in no time. The Guide concept isn’t finished yet, but I’ve already opened up the store in my apps.
Right now it’s possible for walkers and cyclists to download the necessary map tiles for a route so they can perform their activities without internet connection. The app sends logging to the backend and I can see that the offline maps feature is used a lot.
When a user buys the app it comes with 4 map styles bundled that they can use to generate offline maps. But since there’s so many good map styles around — and I’ve got a bit of a map fetish — I have decided to add 10 new map styles from various sources which can be purchased via IAP. Right now the store is available in the Walking app, but other will soon follow.
More logging
I decided I wanted insights on how often the store is used. What I’ve done is create a Products table in the backend that has room for a large description of the products (to allow for a longer description than what iTunes Connect allows) and columns called views and sales. This table also contains the product identifier as defined in iTC. I’ve written 2 api calls to log when a product is viewed and when a product is sold in the app.
The new map styles can be previewed from inside the store, so users will know what they’re buying. Every time a map style is previewed the backend is notified via the viewed api call. Every time a product is sold the backend is notified via the sold api call. The respective column values are increased for that product identifier.
Hopefully in some months time this viewed vs sold ratio will give me an understanding of which products sell best. Might not be very useful for the map styles as I won’t be adding more of them, but it will certainly help me understand which Guides are sold most, and act upon that.
I’ve also made an admin page to visualize the viewed vs sold ratio for every product, ordered by how well they’re selling.
Keep ‘m synced
The only “worry” in this setup is that I must remember to create a backend Product for every IAP I create in iTC.
The advantage of linking the iTC data and the Products table together is that I can create a much richer store experience. Every Guide IAP, for example, will come with a few preview photos that will be shown in the store. This setup makes that possible.
Logging whatever data you want to log becomes easy as well and I should be able to get a good idea of which products are hot and which are not.
Finally this setup allows me to send out notifications when a product is sold. I could push this notification to my phone or watch and have a live heartbeat of how things are selling when I’m out and about.
