I believe being able to provide refunds is important. When you go to a
real-world store, you can touch, look at, try on items before paying,
and yet stores typically let you bring purchases back and get a refund.
This is so that the customer knows that if something - unexpected and
unforeseen - goes wrong, he can get his money back. That's psychology,
not technology.
Secondly, as a user, I prefer the situation where the pro version offers
additional features compared to the lite version, and not where the lite
version has the same features, and is deliberately made annoying in some
way (nag screens, start-up delays, etc.) The user hopefully goes to buy
the pro version to get those extra features, hoping that they work as
advertised, but he has no ways to verify that before paying.
Third, putting info about refunds in the application's UI would directly
contradict what the user sees in the purchase window. And since the
former is part of the application, and the latter comes from Google,
which one do you think he's going to believe?
Finally, providing information to the user about refunds in one place,
the purchase window, would seem to me like valuable thing. Probably not
too difficult to provide a boolean flag in the API so that the purchase
window can say "Refunds for this item are provided by the developer".
-- Kostya
05.02.2011 1:56, Dianne Hackborn ?????:
On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Kostya Vasilyev <kmans...@gmail.com
<mailto:kmans...@gmail.com>> wrote:
I'm just concerned that it might deter purchases for lite to pro
conversions.
For buying in-game gems or potions it shouldn't really matter,
those are impulse purchases and for smaller amounts too.
Why would it deter payments?
Here's the main value I see in the refund period: there is something
you are purchasing, that you haven't actually been able yet to even
try to download and install, so really have no idea what you are
getting. Being able to get a refund if it is not what you want,
buggy, or has other issues is important to have any confidence in
buying in that situation.
Using in-app purchases within an app is entirely different though.
Consider the same situation with a lite vs. pro version: you
downloaded the app for free, have been using it for however long you
want (or however long the developer will let you), and have no decided
it is worth spending $X to purchase it (or unlock a certain feature
etc). What benefit does a refund period really give you here?
Or look at this another way: the beauty of using in-app purchases for
all of this is that *you* are in complete control of the user
experience through this thing. All you need to do is get the user to
download and run your free app, and after that you get to decide
exactly how you want to interact with the user towards paying for the
app. All in-app billing provides is the final point where the user
has decided "yes it is worth the money, I am paying." So you can do
all kinds of things:
- Have the full app running as a limited time trial, after which the
user must purchase to continue using.
- Have the full app running with ads, and the user able to pay to get
rid of the ads.
- Have limited features available in the free app, with a payment to
unlock the full features (or even multiple payment options to unlock
different features).
- Allow the user to try out for-pay features for a limited amount of time.
- Show a nag message every now and then encouraging the user to pay
for your app to encourage further development.
- And on and on!
And in all of these cases, it is clear that the interactions here are
directly between you as the app developer and your users, with Market
now just being the point where the user hands over some cash.
--
Dianne Hackborn
Android framework engineer
hack...@android.com <mailto:hack...@android.com>
Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time
to provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All
such questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others
can see and answer them.
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