question

thirdparty avatar image
thirdparty asked

Sandbox payments are counting for the real purchases analytics (iOS).

Hello all,

Today while researching in the dashboard purchases I found that it seems to be counting the sandbox buys in iOS as if they were real purchases (at least in the dashboard, I don't know if they are counting in the periodic reports):

"PaymentProvider": "iTunes Sandbox"

And maybe I'm wrong but I think those purchases must be removed from counting like real money.

Is this a bug? What do you think about this?

Thank you for your time.

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brendan avatar image
brendan answered

Currently, all purchases are counted the same in reporting. We do have a backlog item for separation of these purchases in our own reporting, though since it's only possible to get sandbox receipts for a title you own on the receipt validation platforms, this should hopefully be something you can account for by tracking on test cases. For non-receipt validation platforms, sandbox testing of payments is currently available in Steam via the Sandbox option in your title's settings. Other platforms will have sandbox testing available at a later date.

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thirdparty avatar image
thirdparty answered

I understand what you say. But it's a big pain to check one by one in the reports when it's already avaible in the events I can see in PlayFab.

Could it be posible to include other info like that in the reports at less?

The other problem I see with sandbox testing checkbox is that when you mark it you are telling the system to count all purchase events like testing ones, when it could be (and it will be) that at the same time you are testing the game other people is doing some real purchases in the system.

The only thing I see it could be done in a clean way is to have some way to delete/hide some events from reporting/showing in dashboard manually.

Thank you for your time.

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brendan answered

We will be providing separation of reporting for debug purchases at a later date, but could you explain what you mean concerning "at the same time you are testing the game other people is doing some real purchases"? I take it you mean that you want a title to handle both sandbox and non-sandbox purchases at the same time, and separate them for reporting? To be clear, when using non-receipt purchase systems, we do generally have to specify one or the other, with little opportunity to do the kind of fallback we do with receipt validation (we check both live and sandbox for those). Few players have sandbox accounts in the various payment providers, so that should help to prevent any additional issues, but if you have a title that specifically will be testing both live and non-live non-receipt values, we would appreciate any additional info.

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thirdparty avatar image
thirdparty answered

"at the same time you are testing the game other people is doing some real purchases"? I take it you mean that you want a title to handle both sandbox and non-sandbox purchases at the same time, and separate them for reporting?

Yes, I'm talking about receipt validation ones. Our testing team is using iOS test accounts which are using the iTunes Sandbox Provider. But at the same time there is people around the world doing real purchases with the same TitleID.

And I'm talking only about receipt validation purchases. The idea is to have the reports clean from dirty testing buys. And the fastest way I think is that you add PaymentProvider info among other vars or let the admin to hide some events.

Thank you for your time.

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brendan answered

Yes, in addition to your own testing, Apple will test sandbox purchases against a live title as part of any update testing, so it's important that we're always able to process both for titles, which we do.

As I said, we'll provide a way to differentiate these purchases in title reporting in an upcoming release. It is something we want to take care of as soon as we can, but there are a number of items that more developers have been asking for ahead of it in our queue.

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