Linking players to your web shop from inside the app

For years, the only way to point a player at a cheaper checkout was to hope they found your website on their own. You could not put a button in the game that said "buy here for less." That changed in the United States in 2025, and a lot of studios are still deciding what to do about it.

The shift is narrow but real. A US court ruling in the Epic Games v. Apple case, decided at the end of April 2025, requires Apple to let developers place a direct link inside the app to an external purchasing flow. Google operates under similar pressure. The practical result: a US player can now tap a button in your game and land on your own web shop, where the platform does not take its cut.

The headline number is the reason this matters. Most web shop providers take around 5 percent of revenue. The app stores take 30 percent on most transactions. On paper, moving a sale off-platform keeps an extra quarter of the price in your pocket. But the gap between the paper math and the real outcome is where most of the decisions live.

What the ruling actually changed

Before 2025, you could run a web shop, but you could not advertise it inside the app. Players had to discover it themselves — through a Discord, a newsletter, a banner outside the game. That friction meant only your most engaged players ever used it. The web shop reached the people who were already looking for it, not the broad middle of your spending base.

The in-app link removes that one specific barrier. You can now surface the web shop at the moment a player is deciding to buy, inside the game, where attention is highest. That is the entire change. It is significant because the moment of intent is the most valuable moment in monetization, and you previously could not act on it for off-platform sales.

Two things did not change, and they matter as much as the thing that did.

First, this is a US-specific permission. The in-app link is allowed because of a US court ruling. Other regions have their own rules — the EU's Digital Markets Act opens similar doors in Europe, but the mechanics and the exact permissions differ by market. You cannot assume a global rollout. A link that is compliant in the US may not be compliant elsewhere, and getting this wrong risks your app listing.

Second, the platform still owns the in-app payment relationship. When a player buys through the app store, the store handles the card, the refund, the chargeback, the tax, and the fraud check. The moment you move a sale to your web shop, all of that becomes yours.

What you now own

This is the part most studios underweight when they look at the 5 percent versus 30 percent comparison. The 25-point gap is not free margin. It is the price the platform charged for doing work that you now have to do.

Payment processing is the obvious piece. A processor like Stripe charges roughly 2.9 percent plus a fixed fee per transaction. That is already part of the web shop economics most providers quote, so it is usually accounted for. The less visible costs are the ones that show up later.

Refunds and chargebacks move onto your books. When a player disputes a charge — because a child made the purchase, because they forgot they bought it, or because they are committing friendly fraud — your team handles the dispute and eats the fee. On the app store, that cost was largely invisible to you. Off-platform, it is a line item you manage, and the burden is rising across the industry, not falling.

Tax is the piece that surprises teams the most. Selling digital goods directly means you are responsible for collecting and remitting sales tax, VAT, or GST depending on where the player lives. This is genuinely complex, and getting it wrong is a legal exposure, not just an accounting headache. This is why many studios use a merchant-of-record provider — services like Xsolla, AppCharge, or similar — that becomes the legal seller and handles tax remittance for you. A merchant of record costs more than a bare payment processor, but it converts a compliance problem into a service you pay for.

Then there is trust. When a player buys through the App Store, they are buying from a brand they already trust with their card. When they buy through your web shop, they are entering payment details into a checkout they have never seen. A clumsy or unfamiliar checkout loses sales that the platform would have closed. The conversion rate on your web shop will almost never match the conversion rate of native in-app purchase, and that difference quietly eats into the margin advantage.

How to think about the math honestly

The right way to evaluate a web shop is not "5 percent versus 30 percent." It is the full landed cost of a sale on each path, including the sales you lose to checkout friction.

A useful way to frame it: take the share of a web-shop sale that actually reaches you after processing, refunds, tax handling, and merchant-of-record fees, then multiply by the conversion rate you realistically expect off-platform versus in-app. If your web shop converts at, say, two-thirds the rate of native purchase, a large part of the headline margin gain disappears before you count it.

This does not mean web shops are a bad idea. For studios with a strong, engaged player base and high-value purchases, the economics often work clearly in favor of the web shop, even after every cost. The point is that the decision should be made on the full picture, not the 5-versus-30 slogan.

It also means a web shop is rarely an all-or-nothing choice. The pattern that works for most studios is selective: route high-value purchases and your most engaged, highest-trust players to the web shop, where the margin gain is largest and the conversion gap is smallest, while leaving routine low-value purchases on the native in-app flow where the platform's trust and convenience close the sale.

What to instrument before you launch one

If you do add an in-app link to a web shop, the thing that separates a good rollout from a guess is measurement. You need to know the web shop's conversion rate, not assume it. You need to track refunds and chargebacks as a real cost, not discover them at the end of the quarter. And you need to compare the lifetime value of players you route to the web shop against an equivalent group you leave on native purchase — otherwise you cannot tell whether the web shop is genuinely adding margin or just moving sales around at a hidden cost.

That last point is the one studios skip most often. Moving a sale off-platform changes more than the fee. It changes the buyer's experience, the refund path, and the trust signal at checkout. Without a clean comparison against a baseline group, you are flying on the 5-percent slogan and hoping it holds.

This is the same discipline that should govern any change to how you charge players: measure the real outcome against a real comparison, not the theory. See how GameMantra approaches measurement → — the tools that tell you whether a monetization change actually helped are the ones that pay for themselves first.

The in-app web shop link is a genuine opening. It is just not a free one. Treat it as a new sales channel you now operate end to end — with all the costs and all the upside that implies — and the decision gets a lot clearer.