Your customers may choose to subscribe through different marketplaces, such as Google Play or the App Store. As a subscription business grows, managing these separate subscription sources can become genuinely complex, especially when customers also subscribe directly through your website or have subscriptions added manually by your sales team.
Zoho Billing's new Omnichannel Subscription feature brings subscriptions from all these sources into one place, using Zoho Billing's In-App Purchases SDK to sync subscriptions made through different marketplaces.
How It Works
The Zoho Billing In-App Purchase SDK (ZSInAppPurchaseKit) connects your mobile app subscriptions with Zoho Billing and keeps subscription details up to date, following this flow:
- A customer purchases a subscription, and the App Store or Google Play confirms the purchase.
- The SDK securely sends the purchase details to Zoho Billing for validation.
- Zoho Billing verifies the purchase and matches it to the corresponding plan.
- The subscription is created on the customer's record, or their existing subscription is updated.
- From then on, renewals, upgrades, downgrades, pauses, cancellations, and expirations are automatically reflected in Zoho Billing.
What This Means in Practice
Customers can subscribe through whichever channel they prefer, while you get a single, unified view of all their subscriptions inside Zoho Billing, rather than having to piece that picture together across several separate systems.
Why This Matters
- A complete view of customer subscriptions from one place, rather than several disconnected ones
- Reduced manual subscription tracking across channels
- Customer records that stay properly connected as subscription sources multiply
The underlying challenge isn't giving customers more ways to subscribe; it's keeping track of those relationships as they spread across marketplaces. Omnichannel Subscription means adding another marketplace doesn't also mean giving your team another place to manage subscriptions.
Setting It Up
Setup involves connecting your Apple App Store or Google Play Store account, configuring your plans and products, setting up the required notifications, and integrating the SDK into your mobile app using Zoho's iOS or Android SDK guides. Once configured, Zoho Billing keeps your mobile subscription information updated automatically as customers move through their subscription lifecycle.
Early access: Omnichannel Subscription is currently available in early access, so it may not yet be visible in every Zoho Billing organisation by default.
Need help? Want Omnichannel Subscription enabled for your organisation, or help integrating the SDK into your mobile app? Reach out to 1 Cloud Consultants at zoho@1cloudconsultants.com, or
book a discovery call, and we'll help you get set up.
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