Just as expected! Does anyone know any good alternatives to handle payments and licensing, preferably something which doesn't require any upfront fee? Currently I'm using Gumroad for an extension I run (https://codegena.com/WAXP) but would love to know other options.
Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
111–120 of 175 posts
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe provide some options: - Default to an automatic resubscription for (say) 50-75% of the current list price - Consent to OAuth2 Google ("one-time blahblahblah"), and retrieve perpetual payment info that way - Accept Store receipts (capturing all email headers and keeping all PDFs for cross-comparison... meh) I wonder if you should send 2 warning emails or 3. ("action required" "your account will automatically be…
Yeah, if we could email our customers that would be great. Unfortunately, I can't find a way to access the email addresses for our customers. Maybe I'm really dumb, but all I can find are anonymized transaction IDs. It would be a lot better if they would allow us to contact our users via email. Instead, we're going to have to use pop-up messages that annoy users and are likely to be reflexively closed by many of them…
Oh noooo. I see now. The documentation helpfully completely sidesteps this probably quite widespread scenario!
Thinking about it, it's not really on point for Google™©® to connect you with your customers; your outreach could be considered unsolicited and G could be argued to be enabling spam. What a wonderful situation G has dug for itself here.
The only thought I can come up with is to partially break or otherwise "wait what"-ify your extension's behavior to concretely capture users' attention. You mentioned it does PDF processing of some kind; a relevant example in this case could be injecting new page(s) into generated output (or watermarking, but that may be mechanically trickier, and my knee-jerk connection to watermarking could wind up being "meep, this software has just gone rogue on me" - and depending on my stress level I may not actually read any notices).
Said injected (or overlaid) content would likely immediately first clarify that visiting the options page and clicking a giant green button will 100% revert functionality. It would probably also do well to include a website name (also showing a giant banner), a contact email address (RIP in advance), and possibly a suggestion/invitation to forward the PDF to internal IT for review in case of doubt (which would neatly offload some % of "???" to external labor that is incidentally highly trusted, but may look odd).
FWIW, I noticed the latest versions of Chrome have redesigned the extension UI; overflow icons have moved from the system menu into a dedicated popup. Some users (Windows) likely have this update, while others (eg, myself using Chromium 83.0/Debian, and version-locked enterprise users) don't. So hypothetical screenshots would need to illustrate both flows.
Besides all that, auto-renewing to some (non-low-end, because why not) percentage of the current list price, and straightforwardly handling refunds, seems to be the only obvious fallthrough I can see.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wh- why is that a bad thing? What about it would be made better by JS?
It's just a document, html is the reasonable choice for things like that.
If you want to PR and then maintain 200 html list item components by hand, you’re more than welcome to join as a co-maintainer. :)
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#114Google Deprecation is the only Google service out lives Google Search.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#115The interesting thing here is that a commercial marketplace for browser extensions failed. That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?! Is it just that nobody paid for things? Presumably they're going to keep running the chrome web store, so isn't a cut of paymens "free money" to them? Is there some big cost to this I'm not seeing,…
Anecdotally, I could probably get lots of value from some extensions (even free ones) but I generally won't consider installing them because a lot of the ones I could get value from would be able to intercept all data rather than specific sites or during times when I choose to activate them.
I hypothesize that there's a very substantial intersection between the set of users who would benefit from extensions and the set of users who might be concerned about security implications of the current extensions system in Chrome.
I would also be interested to write & monetise extensions except that I anticipate usage may be limited due to the above.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#116Google Deprecation is the only Google service out lives Google Search.
Makes sense: when life will end, Death will still be there.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a document, html is the reasonable choice for things like that.
If you want to PR and then maintain 200 html list item components by hand, you’re more than welcome to join as a co-maintainer. :)
I'm guessing it's using static hosting so server side rendering is out of the question, but if you wanted to make it work without JavaScript a static site generator could be used to avoid having to maintain 200 list items manually.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a document, html is the reasonable choice for things like that.
If you want to PR and then maintain 200 html list item components by hand, you’re more than welcome to join as a co-maintainer. :)
Wouldn’t a static site generator take care of that? Not being snarky just asking.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#119Just my luck... I created my extension and started monetizing it March of this year...
See the other thread where a Google employee offers to make it right.
I reckon most people who wrote extensions would be happy for Google to keep the $25 and instead refund the time they spent writing the extension.
Re: Chrome Web Store payments deprecation
#120The interesting thing here is that a commercial marketplace for browser extensions failed. That seems surprising - surely a marketplace for extensions to the most popular browser on the planet could bring in some revenue?! Is it just that nobody paid for things? Presumably they're going to keep running the chrome web store, so isn't a cut of paymens "free money" to them? Is there some big cost to this I'm not seeing,…
Average users just don’t “do” extensions. People typically don’t mod their software. I’ve learnt this over the years. Any sort of extension, “power toy” or customization is always going to be a niche, in the great scheme of things.
> Is there some big cost to this I’m not seeing
If I had to guess, I would imagine at some point someone had to revamp the payment backend for the store (because “software is never done” and people have to get promoted somehow), and reimplementing the gateway to extensions was deemed too much of a hassle.