Google Play has over 2.5 billion users in more than 190 markets, allowing developers to reach a vast global audience. This year, the official aim is to enhance your ability to reach these market customers by making it easier for developers to facilitate secure and seamless purchases.
Expanded Payment Options: More Ways for Customers to Pay for Your Content
Google Play’s extensive library of payment methods continues to grow, including traditional payment methods like credit cards and over 300 local payment methods in more than 65 markets.
In Brazil, Pix has been enabled, and support for UPI in India has been enhanced to simplify subscription purchases, allowing developers to offer their preferred payment methods to hundreds of millions of customers in these markets.
The ability for customers to shop for others has also been expanded. Customers who have set up Google Family can now approve their children’s purchases on Android from any operating system.
Starting in India, customers can share payment links via their preferred messaging service or email, asking friends or family members outside the Google Family group to purchase apps or in-app products for them.
Optimized Pricing: Pricing Your Products According to Local Purchasing Power
Finding the right price for your products is crucial for attracting customers and maximizing revenue.
Google Play now automatically updates price ranges to reflect currency fluctuations against the US dollar. Whenever we suggest a price adjustment for your in-app items, you will see a new inbox notification in the Play Console.
To give you greater pricing flexibility, you can now price your products up to $999.99 or the local equivalent on Google Play.
Improved Purchase Experience: Enhancing Checkout Performance
Providing more guidance and flexibility to customers and giving you tools to fine-tune these experiences makes the purchase process more seamless and convenient.
New badges such as “Bestseller,” “Popular,” and “Trending” have been added to the Play Store to help guide customers towards purchases.
With the new installment subscription feature, you can offer customers long-term subscription options with installment payments, helping to increase your sign-ups and lifetime value. Early access programs have shown an 8% increase in total subscription registrations and a 4% increase in user spending.
New Play Billing Lab App: Simplifying Adoption and Testing
A new Play Billing Lab app has been introduced to make it easier to adopt and test features that can help you improve the customer experience for one-time purchases and subscriptions. This lab allows you to test your integration with the Play billing system, create test configurations without impacting real users, and experiment with country/region coverage and subscription lifecycle changes.
To take advantage of these features and all other capabilities offered by the commerce platform, make sure to upgrade to Play Billing Library 7.0 later this month. This year, the deprecation schedule for the library will be adjusted according to Play policies, with support for version 5 ending in August 2024.
