The In-App Store

The in-app store is the ecommerce area inside your app, the listings, product pages, cart, and checkout where money actually changes hands.

You have people inside and browsing, and now some of them want to buy. This is the part that looks like any online shop: a product to tap, a page that explains it, a cart, and a checkout. But there is a split here that catches people out, and it comes down to what you are selling. If you sell physical goods and real-world services, shipped products, a haircut booking, a hotel night, you can use your own normal payment methods and card processors. If you sell digital goods and subscriptions that are consumed inside the app, coins, a premium tier, content you pay to open, the platforms generally require you to run that through Apple's or Google's in-app billing under their store rules, and they take a cut.

Knowing which bucket you are in changes your whole flow, your margins, and even your pricing, so you sort it out before you design the checkout, not after a reviewer rejects your update.

One moving piece to watch. The rules are region-dependent and changing, and after recent court fights both stores now let some US apps link out to their own web checkout for digital purchases, so treat "always use in-app billing for digital" as the default rather than a law and check your market.

Physical and digital play by different money rules, and checkout friction kills the sale in silence.