Facebook today announced that subscription payments are now available to all developers with apps on the site.

The company originally announced the program in beta with Zynga, Playdom and Kixeye as partners in June. Now any developer can offer subscriptions for virtual goods, premium experiences or updated content within their apps for a monthly fee.

Developers can set different prices based on a user’s local currency and offer different levels of subscriptions. They can also offer free trial periods. This flexibility could help developers better monetize their apps. The model could also lead players to spend more in games and also makes Facebook a better option for developers of free-to-play browser-based massively multiplayer online role-playing games. It might also be a start to getting non-game developers to try the social network’s payment platform. For example, professional networking app BranchOut or news apps like Washington Post Social Reader might find uses for subscriptions. However, Facebook will take a 30 percent fee from these transactions.

Developers can combine subscriptions and in-app payments. For instance, a game might offer a monthly subscription for energy or supplies and sell vanity items through in-app purchases. Users can pay for subscriptions with a credit card or PayPal account, and they can cancel from their Facebook payment settings. Facebook recommends that developers provide a cancel option from within their apps as well.

Developers can learn more about implementing subscription payments here. Daily transaction data about subscriptions will be available for download through the payments reporting API introduced on Monday.

See an example of subscriptions in Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time below.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook today announced that it has launched a payments reporting API to allow developers to download daily reports of transaction data, instead of receiving that information through email.

Facebook says the new system, which is available beginning today, will be more reliable, secure and flexible. The API has built-in checks to ensure developers receive all the data. The new report is formatted as a structured csv file, instead of the former flat tsv file. Developers are likely to find this more useful than emails. Previously only one person from a company could receive the payments report. Now multiple people can download the report. It will also allow developers to better integrate transaction data into their own systems, and with the csv file, it will continue to work regardless of whether Facebook adds more data fields in the future.

This API will also support Facebook’s transition away from Credits to local currency later this year and subscription payments. Details about how to implement the API are available here. The payments reporting API can be downloaded securely via https using an OAuth-secured HTTP interface. Facebook will stop sending daily email reports on Nov. 7.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook has updated its payment terms for both users and developers following Tuesday’s announcement that it would support monthly subscription billing for apps and games on its platform and phase out Credits in favor of a user’s local currency.

Note that Facebook’s transition from Credits to local currency is not an indication that the social network is getting out of the payments business. In fact, it is expanding it to be more similar to Apple’s iTunes App Store model, rather than emphasizing virtual currency. This should give Facebook more flexibility as it looks to monetize apps beyond games.

Overall, the new policies are more comprehensive and better organized, which is important as the number of users and developers who use Facebook’s payments platform expands over the next year to include more non-game transactions.

For users, the social network added more information and terms about various payment methods, and made it clearer that users under 18 cannot use Facebook Payments only with the involvement of a parent or guardian. The age stipulation was previously one of the final points on the user terms page. Now it is in the second paragraph. The payment methods section, including a definition of Facebook Credits, is completely new.

In the new payment methods section, the company expanded its payments terms to explain its policy around gift cards and introduced terms around mobile billing. For example, Facebook noted that it is not a bank and that gift card balances are not deposits and do not earn interest. Surprisingly, Facebook didn’t make any mention of mobile billing in its previous policy. The social network recently rolled out a two-step payments flow for mobile apps, but has supported mobile carrier billing for years.

Readers can compare Facebook’s new user payment terms with its previous policy from March 27 here.

For developers, Facebook changed its “Facebook Credits Terms” to the new brand of “Facebook Developer Payment Terms.” The terms page now includes more explanation of payouts and introduces the term “developer balance.”  Whenever developers complete a sale on the platform, Facebook will credit the proceeds, minus a 30 percent service fee, to a developer’s balance. The new policy is reorganized with clearer headlines and explanations, for example, including a section called “Your Responsibilities and Risks.” The section compiles conditions that were previously incorporated into several different areas of the document.

Developers can compare Facebook’s new developer payment terms with its previous credits policy from November 2011 here.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook will soon support subscription billing for apps on its platform, according to a post on the company’s developer blog. The company will also phase out Credits in favor of a user’s local currency — dollars, pounds or yen, for example.

Subscriptions will launch to all developers in July, though Zynga and Kixeye are already testing the feature for their games. This change gives developers a way to charge users on a monthly basis, rather than relying on individual virtual goods purchases. The alternative model could help developers and Facebook better monetize. It could also be a start to getting non-game developers to try Facebook’s payment platform.

As our sister blog Inside Social Games explains, subscriptions could lead players to spend more in games and also makes Facebook a better option for developers of free-to-play browser-based massively multiplayer online role-playing games.

We’ve previously written about how the social network was likely to introduce subscriptions as a way to monetize non-game applications. Because Facebook Credits aren’t required for these apps, only a few developers use them. For example, some studios offer movie rentals for Facebook Credits. These companies might now consider testing a subscription model that gives users access to more movies or special features if they sign up for a multi-month package. Facebook subscriptions will also support free trial periods, which could incentive users to sign up.

Other businesses built on Facebook, such as professional networking app BranchOut or news apps like Washington Post Social Reader, might find uses for subscriptions, however the social network’s 30 percent fee is likely to turn off many developers. For companies like Spotify and Netflix, which have to pay huge licensing fees to rights-holders, losing 30 percent simply isn’t an option unless they significantly increased their prices. But at higher price points, consumers might not decide to subscribe at all. [Update 6/19/12 2:08 p.m. PT - A screenshot of a sample subscription settings page on Facebook's developer site includes Spotify, MOG and RunKeeper as sample apps using subscriptions. It's unclear whether these are simply examples or actual developers in the beta program.]

Although the 30 percent fee is standard for app platforms like Apple and Android, it is far more than what online payments systems like PayPal charge. PayPal takes a 2.9 percent fee plus a $0.30-fee for each transaction. Facebook acknowledged in a regulatory filing that it might reduce its fee, but for now the 30 percent seems to stand.

Facebook, though, is in a unique position to streamline payments and offer developers useful data about who’s paying for subscriptions. If businesses can automatically gather information they would otherwise have to ask users for through forms, Facebook’s payments platform would be more attractive. Ease of implementation, increasing conversions and providing useful reporting are all areas the social network will need to improve as it expands its payments business.

With the latest phase out of Credits and by now supporting pricing in local currency, Facebook can simplify the purchase experience and give developers more flexibility. Developers will be able to set more granular and consistent prices for non-U.S. users and price the same item differently on a market-by-market basis. This also eliminates any confusion that resulted from users trying to think about conversion rates for dollars, Credits and in-game currency. Facebook says it will convert any Credit balances into the equivalent amount of value in users’ local currency, which they can spend on in-app items in the same way they do today. People can still redeem gift cards and store unused balances in their account. Any apps or games that sell virtual items will be required to use local currency by the end of the year.

The company first introduced what it called “Pay with Facebook” in May 2009. That eventually got combined with the Credits program associated with virtual gifts that users could buy and post to each other’s profiles. In July 2011, Facebook made Credits mandatory for social games, leading payments and fees revenue to make up about 18 percent of the company’s revenue in its most recent quarter — up from a 13 percent in Q1 2011. Only 15 million users — fewer than 2 percent of total monthly active users — paid for virtual goods on the platform in 2011. Facebook has helped individual game developers who wanted to implement a recurring pay cycle in the past, but for the most part, subscriptions haven’t been an option until now.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook