Blog of our latest news, updates, and stories for developers
Making it even easier to monetize your games
Thursday, March 1, 2012
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
New debugging dashboard for the Google Content API for Shopping
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
By Thomas Kotzmann and Paul Brauner, Google Content API for Shopping Team
Cross-posted from the
Google Commerce Blog
Today we're announcing the API dashboard in
Google Merchant Center
, which makes it easier for online merchants who use the
Google Content API for Shopping
to debug their API requests.
If you’re an API user, you can now view a comprehensive timeline and list of errors that occurred while making requests to the API, sorted by the number of times the errors occurred for faster prioritization. For each error, the dashboard also displays example request and response pairs, making it easier to locate and fix errors in your requests.
To access the new API dashboard, log into your
Google Merchant Center
account and click the
API Dashboard
tab.
Posted by
Scott Knaster
, Editor
Fridaygram: goodbye to 2011
Friday, December 23, 2011
By Scott Knaster,
Google Code Blog
Editor
This is the last Fridaygram of 2011, and like most everybody else, we’re in a reflective mood. It’s also the 208th post on Google Code Blog this year, which means we’ve averaged more than one post every two days, so that’s plenty of stuff for you to read. What did we write about?
At Google, we love to launch. Many of our posts were about
new APIs and client libraries
. We also posted a bunch of times about
HTML5 and Chrome
and about
making the web faster
. And we posted about
Android
,
Google+
, and
Google Apps
developer news.
Many of our 2011 posts were about the steady progress of App Engine, Cloud Storage, and other
cloud topics
for developers. We also published several times about
commerce and in-app payments
.
2011 was a stellar year for Google I/O and other developer events around the world. Some of our most popular posts provided
announcements, details, and recaps
of these events. And we welcomed a couple dozen
guest posts during Google I/O
from developers with cool stories to tell.
The two most popular Code Blog posts of the year were both launches: the
Dart preview
in October, and the
Swiffy launch
in June.
Last, and surely least, I posted 26
Fridaygrams
in an attempt to amuse and enlighten you. Thank you for reading those, and thanks for dropping by and reading
all the posts
we’ve thrown your way this year. See you in 2012!
And finally, please enjoy
one more Easter egg
.
In-App Payments expands its borders
Thursday, December 15, 2011
By Pali Bhat, Group Product Manager
Cross-posted on the
Google Commerce Blog
and
Chromium Blog
Since
Google In-App Payments
launched in July for developers in the United States, we’ve received great
feedback
on how easy it is to integrate as well as how simple it is for consumers to use. While the API has been off to a strong start, there’s been a growing demand for availability outside of the United States.
So starting today, we are opening developer enrollment for Google In-App Payments to 17 additional countries. In addition to the United States, developers from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom can now use the Google In-App Payments API to incorporate an in-context payment experience into applications on the
Chrome Web Store
and their own sites.
Developers using In-App Payments are
seeing strong conversions and revenue streams
thanks to these key features:
Ease of use
: the short payment process for consumers takes place right in the developer’s app or site.
Large existing user base
: there are millions of
Google Wallet
online users in over 140 countries.
Low fees
: developers pay just 5% on all transactions.
You can get started accepting payments in your web apps by
following the tutorial
and get answers to any questions in the
forum
. We look forward to expanding to even more countries in the future, as well as continuously working to improve the Google In-App Payments experience.
Posted by
Scott Knaster
, Editor
Monetizing games with In-App Payments
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
This guest post was written by Beau Harrington, Senior Development Director, Kabam
Cross-posted with the
Google Commerce Blog
Kabam
was part of the initial launch of Google+ Games with two game titles,
Dragons of Atlantis
and
Edgeworld
, and we recently added
Global Warfare
. For these games, we integrated
Google In-App Payments
and we’re pleased with our games’ monetization to date. There are a couple things we learned along the way that we’re happy to share with the community.
Integrating In-App Payments
Integrating In-App Payments in our games was very simple, especially when compared to other payment platforms. There is excellent
documentation
available, complete with examples for each step of the purchase flow. We also used open-source libraries such as
ruby-jwt
to generate the tokens required for each purchase option.
We designed our games and purchase pages around the expectation of instant feedback, making sure to incorporate page loads or refreshes wherever possible. For example, in Edgeworld, a player attacking an enemy base can load the list of Platinum options instantly, without waiting for the list of payment options to load. After their Platinum purchase, the player is immediately brought back to the game, with their new currency and items waiting for them.
Pro tip: strive to reduce purchaser friction
One of the keys to maximizing revenue is to remove as much friction as possible from the purchase flow, making sure as many people as possible get from one step of the flow to the next. Many payment platforms send players to their own website and multi-page checkout flow. The Google In-App Payments approach allows us to keep players on our game page for the entire flow, making sure we can manage more of the process and reduce abandonment.
Additionally, the player's credit card information is stored securely, so once a player has made a purchase anywhere using In-App Payments, their information is available for future purchases without additional data entry. Finally, JavaScript callbacks provided by In-App Payments allow us to show the effects of the purchase immediately, improving customer satisfaction.
General recommendations
For those experienced in this space, the following may seem rudimentary. At the same time, I’d be remiss not to include these recommendations as they are important to developing a successful game payments system:
Make sure your payment flow is as seamless as possible, never giving the player the opportunity to get bored waiting for something to load.
Record and monitor each step of the payment flow in order to identify potential problems.
Run A/B tests on your purchase option page to optimize the number of players who make a purchase, as well as the amount of the average purchase.
We are proud to be among the first companies on Google’s exciting new monetization platform, and we look forward to the continuing growth in features, functionality and developer tools.
Beau Harrington is Senior Development Director of
Kabam
Posted by
Scott Knaster
, Editor
International success with the Chrome Web Store
Monday, September 26, 2011
By Alexandra Levich, Product Manager
Cross-posted from the
Chromium Blog
We recently
expanded the reach
of the Chrome Web Store from the U.S. to 24 more countries. Developers from around the world have already launched successful apps in the Chrome Web Store to US users. Now all developers can reach a global user base.
What makes this global reach even more interesting is the global payments infrastructure that goes along with it. The store allows developers from
20 countries
to sell apps in the store, and users to buy apps in their local currency. We also recently launched the
In-App Payments API
, which allows developers (U.S.-only for now; international soon) to sell virtual goods in their apps. Integration is easy and transaction fees are only 5%.
Graphicly
, an early user of in-app payments, saw its net revenues double after starting to use the API and experienced an even bigger rise in profit margins due to increased conversions and lower transaction fees.
In keeping with our international theme, we’d like to highlight a few developers from different parts of the world who have utilized Chrome’s global reach to find success in the store:
Audiotool
is an online music production app that was built by a team of German developers. They saw the Chrome Web Store as a way to present their app to an international audience. Audiotool’s traffic increased by 20% after launching in the store, and this motivated the team to release
another app
in the store.
Psykopaint
is the brainchild of French developer Mathieu Gosselin. The Chrome Web Store provided Mathieu an opportunity to get his photo painting app noticed outside of France. Traffic to Psykopaint has jumped by 700% since it launched in the store and Mathieu has found that Chrome Web Store users tend to be more engaged than other users.
Finally, Nulab, a Japanese company, launched its online diagramming app,
Cacoo
, in the store to expand its user base outside Japan. In just a few months after Cacoo was released in multiple languages in the Chrome Web Store, the app already accounts for 20% of Cacoo’s user base.
The experience of Audiotool, Psykopaint and Nulab shows that no matter where you’re located, you can always find a global audience for your applications in the Chrome Web Store. To learn more about the stories of these and other successful Chrome Web Store developers, read our
case studies
. And if you want to find out more about posting your app in the store, visit our documentation at
code.google.com/chrome/webstore
.
Alex Levich is a product manager working on Chrome Web Store.
Posted by
Scott Knaster
, Editor
Make money with In-App Payments for the Web
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
By Amit Fulay, Product Manager
Cross-posted from the
Google Commerce Blog
.
At the
Google I/O conference
back in May, Vikas Gupta
introduced
a preview of the Google In-App Payments API during the Chrome keynote speech. Google In-App Payments purchases were demonstrated as a simple click right within a web app, so buyers could enjoy a developer’s content, without interruption.
Today, we’re making
Google In-App Payments
available for all web application developers to integrate with their web apps wherever they’re hosted, including the
Chrome Web Store
. Integration is simple with just a few lines of code. And pricing is set at just 5-percent.
In-App Payments is initially available for developers with a United States bank account and for buyers in more than 140 countries. We look forward to expanding to additional developer locations as quickly as possible.
Posted by
Scott Knaster
, Editor
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