Add a hosted checkout to your mobile app

With recent developments in legislation around the App Store, you can link users in the United States to an external checkout for purchases in iOS apps.

You can use hosted checkouts to let users securely make purchases outside your app — no hosting required. Customers tap a button in your app to open a checkout that's fully hosted by Paddle, then they're redirected to your app when they complete their purchase.

What are we building?

In this tutorial, we'll use hosted checkouts in Paddle to build an external purchase flow for in-app purchases in iOS apps.

We'll walk through handling fulfilment using the RevenueCat x Paddle integration or webhooks.

What's not covered

Before you begin

Sign up for Paddle

You'll need a Paddle account to get started. You can sign up for two kinds of account:

• Sandbox — for testing and evaluation
• Live — for selling to customers

For this tutorial, we recommend signing up for a sandbox account. You can transition to a live account later when you've built your integration and you're ready to start selling.

If you sign up for a live account, you'll need to complete account verification. This is where we ask for some information from you to make sure that we can work together. While we're verifying your account, you can't launch a checkout or sell on the Paddle platform.

Prep your iOS development environment

As part of our tutorial, we're going to update our app to include a link to a hosted checkout for purchases. You'll need:

• Some knowledge of iOS development, access to your iOS project, and Xcode on macOS.
• A correctly configured URL scheme so you can redirect users back to your app.

You don't need to make changes to your iOS app to create a hosted checkout in Paddle, so you can come back to this later if you're working with a developer.

Overview

Add a hosted checkout to your app to link out for in-app purchases in five steps:

1. Map your product catalog

   Create products and prices in Paddle that match your in-app purchase options.

2. Create a hosted checkout

   Create a hosted checkout in the Paddle dashboard, including where to redirect customers to after purchase.

3. Add a checkout button to your app

   Create a button that opens the hosted checkout URL when tapped.

4. Handle fulfillment and provisioning

   Use RevenueCat or process webhooks to fulfill purchases after a customer completes a checkout.

5. Take a test payment

   Make a test purchase to make sure your purchase flow works correctly.

1. Map your product catalog

Before we add a hosted checkout to our app, we need to set up our product catalog in Paddle to match the in-app purchases we offer.

Model your pricing

A complete product in Paddle is made up of two parts:

• A product entity that describes the item, like its name, description, and an image.
• At least one related price entity that describes how much and how often a product is billed.

You can create as many prices for a product as you want to describe all the ways they're billed.

In this example, we'll create a single product and single price for a one-time item called Lifetime Access.

Create products and prices

You can create products and prices using the Paddle dashboard or the API.

2. Create a hosted checkout

Next, create a hosted checkout. A hosted checkout is a link that users can use to make a purchase. It's unique to your account.

You can create multiple hosted checkouts if you have different apps or want to create links that redirect to different places in your app.

3. Add a checkout button to your app

Now, update your iOS app to add a button that:

1. Checks to see if in-app purchases are allowed on the device.

2. Checks to see if a user already purchased the item.

3. Constructs a URL using your hosted checkout launch URL, and a price_id query parameter with the price ID you copied previously as the value.

Here's an example using SwiftUI:

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1import SwiftUI
2import StoreKit // required for checking device payment capabilities using SKPaymentQueue
3
4struct PurchaseView: View {
5    let checkoutBaseURL = "https://pay.paddle.io/checkout/hsc_01jt8s46kx4nv91002z7vy4ecj_1as3scas9cascascasasx23dsa3asd2a" // replace with your checkout launch URL
6    let priceId = "pri_01h1vjg3sqjj1y9tvazkdqe5vt" // replace with a price ID
7    
8    var body: some View {
9        VStack {
10            // Check if the device can make payments
11            if SKPaymentQueue.canMakePayments() {
12                // Create a purchase button with styling
13                Button("Buy now") {
14                    openCheckout()
15                }
16                .padding()
17                .background(Color.blue)
18                .foregroundColor(.white)
19                .cornerRadius(10)
20            } else {

Prefill information — recommended

To make for a more seamless user experience, you can use URL parameters to pass additional information to the hosted checkout.

In this updated example, we pass customer details and a unique identifier for the customer in RevenueCat.

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1import SwiftUI
2import StoreKit // required for checking device payment capabilities using SKPaymentQueue
3
4struct PurchaseView: View {
5    let checkoutBaseURL = "https://pay.paddle.io/checkout/hsc_01jt8s46kx4nv91002z7vy4ecj_1as3scas9cascascasasx23dsa3asd2a" // replace with your checkout launch URL
6    let priceId = "pri_01h1vjg3sqjj1y9tvazkdqe5vt" // replace with a price ID
7    
8    // Additional information
9    // In a real app, this would come from your user authentication platform
10    let appUserId = "85886aac-eef6-41df-8133-743cbb1daa4b"
11    let userEmail = "sam@example.com"
12    let countryCode = "US"
13    let postalCode = "10021"
14    
15    var body: some View {
16        VStack {
17            // Check if the device can make payments
18            if SKPaymentQueue.canMakePayments() {
19                // Create a purchase button with styling
20                Button("Buy now") {

4. Handle fulfillment and provisioning

When a customer completes a purchase, they'll be redirected back to your app. At this point, you need to handle fulfilment and unlock the features they bought.

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1app.post("/paddle/webhooks", express.raw({ type: 'application/json' }), async (req, res) => {
2  try {
3    // You can verify the webhook signature here
4    // We don't cover this in the tutorial but it's best practice to do so
5    // https://developer.paddle.com/webhooks/signature-verification
6
7    const payload = JSON.parse(req.body.toString());
8    const { data, event_type } = payload;
9    const occurredAt = payload.occurred_at;
10
11    // Listen for vital events from Paddle
12    switch (event_type) {
13      // 1. Record transactions in the database
14
15      // Handle a new transaction
16      // You can create a Transaction database to store records and associate them to a user
17      case 'transaction.created':
18        // Find the user associated with this transaction
19        const userForTransaction = await User.findOne({ where: { paddleCustomerId: data.customer_id } });
20

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44          await completedTransaction.update({
45            status: data.status,
46            subscriptionId: data.subscription_id,
47            invoiceId: data.invoice_id,
48            invoiceNumber: data.invoice_number,
49            billedAt: data.billed_at,
50            updatedAt: data.updated_at
51          });
52
53          // 2. Provision access to your app
54          // Fetch the user associated with this transaction
55          const user = await User.findOne({ where: { id: completedTransaction.userId } });
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57          if (user) {
58            // Fetch the items from the transaction
59            const purchasedItems = data.items || [];
60
61            // Add what access the user has based on the items they purchased
62            // For this example, we're using access permissions and storing them in the user model on an accessPermissions field
63            // We also map the Paddle product IDs to the access permissions

5. Test the complete flow

Next steps

That's it! Now you've built a purchase workflow that links out to Paddle Checkout, you might like to hook into other features of the Paddle platform.

Learn more about Paddle

When you use Paddle, we take care of payments, tax, subscriptions, and metrics with one unified platform. Customers can self-serve with the portal, and Paddle handles any order inquiries for you.

Build a web checkout

Our tutorial uses a hosted checkout to build a payment workflow. You can also Paddle.js to build pricing pages and signup flows on the web, then redirect people to your app.

Build advanced subscription functionality

Paddle Billing is designed for subscriptions as well as one-time items. You can use Paddle to build workflows to pause and resume subscriptions, flexibly change billing dates, and offer trials.