New monetization and publishing options in the Chrome Web Store

MARCH 11, 2014

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

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