Use In App Purchase For Real Goods

Question

I am developing an iphone application.

In My Application I have a feature to send physical gifts, so we decided to use in app purchase. I have read the Apple documentation for In App purchases, but it does not allow physical goods.

Please let me know if there is an alternative.

Answer 1

Indeed, you are right. Apple does not allow using its IAP for payment of physical goods. Quoting from Apple's Guidelines - 11.3 Apps using IAP to purchase physical goods or goods and services used outside of the application will be rejected.

There are several options you can use to enable in-app payment of physical goods using credit cards - PayPal, Amazon Payments, Card.IO and ZooZ. Each has its own pros/cons.

Another possibility is to build your own credit card processing but this is a challenge of its own with all of the security, merchant account, PCI compliance and other issues.

Oh, and it should be noted that I am the CEO of ZooZ.com :)

Answer 2

You are right, Apple does not allow sale of physical goods through its In-App Purchase. You can use the PayPal SDK to do the sale of physical goods.