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Amazon Turns Off In-App Purchases In iOS Comixology
whisper_jeff writes: "Under the bold assumption that, since they were able to do it with books, they must be able to do it with comics, Amazon has decided to avoid Apple's 30% cut of in app purchases by removing the option from digital comic book platform Comixology for iOS users. It will be interesting to see if digital comic readers leap through the extra hoops to read digital comics on their iOS device or if Amazon has just signed the death knell for their new purchase. Readers may decide that buying a book and buying a comic aren't the same thing — that the extra hoops they're being forced to leap through simply aren't worth it for a comic that takes five minutes to read."
Honestly, one of the great things about comixology was being able to quickly buy/download the next comic in the series when I was binge-reading. I have *hundreds* of comics through them, but I'm not sure if I will be buying any more with this new system. The kindle thing was enough of a pain, but at least a book takes a little longer to read.
I think they've shot themselves in teh foot on this one.
In app purchases pay a 30% fee to Apple to payment processing, etc. Purchases made outside the app (ie: at a developer's website such as amazon.com) do not incur the 30% fee.
It's up to each developer to decide if the 30% fee is worth the ease of use and Apple handling all the payment processing or not. The vast, vast, vast majority of developers happily pay that fee. Amazon is the one high profile developer to buck that trend, first with Kindle and now with Comixology.
I thought that any bolt-ons for apps had to be sold through the Apple Store so they could collect their 30% cut.
You can sell things externally to unlock features - for instance there are many applications for websites that require a paid subscription to work.
What you can't do is provide a link in the app that takes you directly to a purchasing page to work wrounf the in-app thing.
Honestly tough, I've always thought it was a pretty fair trade-off to pay 30% to gan access to many millions of people who already have payment details entered and ready to go at the press of a button.
I'm pretty sure Comixology will lose far more in sales than they would gain by not giving away 30%, I've bought a number of things in the app but if I can't I simply will not bother to figure out how I can get them.
I do think it's a precursor to Amazon folding Comixology into the Kindle application, then it would be easier for people to make use of to buy comics as they already do books for the Kindle app. In that case I don't think they will lose many sales (though that's long term and I've not heard they plan to do so yet).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you're mafia, or Apple.
It probably makes sense for Amazon to do it though considering they have their own infrastructure for handling payments and their own huge customer base. They don't own the content that's being sold either, so I imagine that Apple's 30% cut eats into potential profits by a large amount.
30% wholesale is 23% of retail, apple is taking 30% of retail (42% of wholesale if they were the store), AND THEY AREN'T EVEN THE STORE.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
I know for video that's pretty much the entire profit margin. Apple basically doesn't want any competition to iTunes so they have priced out TVOD/music competitors completely.