New monetization and publishing options in the Chrome Web Store
By Chary
Chen, Chrome Web Store team
Cross-posted from the Chromium
blog
As a developer, you should spend as much of your development time as possible creating great
content and services — not managing overhead. Today we're announcing new tools and services in
the Chrome Web Store that make it easier to automate the publish process and monetize all of
your Chrome Web Store items.
Table 1: Chrome Web Store (CWS) monetization methods by item type
|
Hosted
Apps
|
Packaged
Apps
|
Extensions
|
Themes
|
Free
trial
|
✓
|
✓ new!
|
✓ new!
|
x
|
Paid
up-front
|
✓
|
✓
|
✓ new!
|
✓ new!
|
Subscription
|
✓
|
✓
|
✓ new!
|
x
|
In-app payments
(IAP)
|
Google Wallet for Digital Goods
|
CWS Managed IAP new!
|
CWS Managed IAP new!
|
x
|
The
Managed In-App
Payments feature simplifies the developer experience of our previous solution and
expands it to extensions and themes. You can now create and manage all of your in-app products
directly in the
developer dashboard
instead of having to embed or dynamically generate and serve a payment token for each sale.
You can enable or disable products, provide localized descriptions, set prices for different
regions and the Chrome Web Store manages the licensing.
The
Free
Trial feature, which is now available for Chrome Packaged Apps and Extensions,
allows a developer to specify that an item can be used for a limited time before it must be
purchased. This gives users the flexibility to try paid items before deciding to buy them.
In addition to making it easier to monetize your Web Store items, we have now made it easier
to publish them. Our
Chrome Web Store
API has been expanded to allow developers to programmatically create, update and
publish items in the Web Store. If you have an automated build and deployment process, we hope
you will be able to use this API to integrate the Web Store publishing flow into your existing
process.
We’re excited to release these new features, so please give them a try and send your feedback
via
Stack
Overflow, our
G+
Developers page, or our
developer
forum.
Posted by Chary Chen, Software Engineer & developer delighter
Chary Chen is a member of the Chrome Web Store team, where she connects great
developers with Google-scale users.
Posted by Louis Gray,
Googler