Amazon In-App Purchasing (IAP) includes three different categories of purchasable items, namely consumables, entitlements, and subscriptions. Just like consumable and entitlement IAP, subscriptions allow your app to present, process, and fulfill purchases of premium content. Subscriptions also allow your app to provide subscription-based services to improve user engagement and provide recurring revenue. In order to deploy the subscription IAP service, you need to download the IAP SDK from the link here.

This blog post assumes you already have some basic understanding about deploying a subscription service with digital content and you want to learn more about the subscription behavior.

Example of how to use the IAP subscription

Before we go into the details of subscription behavior, let's review the possible scenarios for using IAP subscriptions:

• A "freemium" service where the app itself is free, but you charge a premium for advanced services or functionality.
• An all-you-can-use service where users can subscribe and enjoy services and functionality (very common for video providers).
• A game membership service that providesperiodic benefits such as weapon, points etc.

The IAP API handles details about purchase flow and payment processing, provides a receipt to your app, and manages rights to the purchasable content, so you don't have to code these things yourself.

Below are some important features that you need to know for a successful deployment.

Subscription period

Amazon IAP provide six types of subscription periods: weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, and annually. It also provide five types of free trial periods: seven days, 14 days, one month, two months, and three months. Users can only enjoy the free trial period once for each service. If a user re-subscribes, there will be no more free period and payment will immediately start.

Billing date

Monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual subscriptions will charge customers on the date that billing started. For example, for a monthly subscription, if the user started the subscription on January 15, the user will be charged every following month on the 15th.

Grace period

If users' credit or debit card have credit issues or issues with the user information (valid period passed), Amazon will notify the user and provide a maximum of six days of grace period for the users to fix the issue. Once the grace period passes, the service will be terminated automatically.

Subscription receipt

After the purchase is completed, Amazon will return a receipt with the details of the cancel date, receipt ID, and subscription period. Here is a receipt sample:

{
 "betaProduct":true,
 "cancelDate":1400784371000,
 "parentProductId":null,
 "productId":"sub1",
 "productType":"SUBSCRIPTION",
 "purchaseDate":1400784241000,
 "quantity":null,
 "receiptId":"JyGJ5iEtYgFu1ngnQovTqSIHQxR53GsMLqkR1tKLp5c=:3:11",
 "renewalDate":null,
 "term":"1 Week",
 "termSku":"sub1-weekly",
 "testTransaction":true
}

Sequence diagram

Here is the sequence diagram overview for Amazon IAP subscription.

Final thoughts

Amazon IAP subscription service provides a powerful payment method for Amazon Appstore developers to improve their user engagement and create a means for recurring revenue. For additional information, view our tech docs here.