Open Paddle Checkout from iOS apps

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

You can use Paddle Checkout to quickly and securely collect for payment for digital products. It presents customers with a secure, optimized payment workflow that handles all parts of the checkout process — minimal frontend coding required.

We're working on a starter kit that you can use to deploy a checkout for iOS apps in a couple of clicks. If you'd like to be the first to get access, join the waitlist.

Join the waitlist

What are we building?

In this tutorial, we'll create a payment flow that lets your iOS app users make purchases through Paddle Checkout.

What's included with Paddle

With Paddle Checkout, you get:

What's not covered

This tutorial walks you through launching Paddle Checkout from an iOS app. It doesn't cover:

• Handling authentication

  We assume you already have a way to identify your users, like Firebase or Sign in with Apple.

• Native in-app purchases

  We'll launch Paddle Checkout in Safari then redirect users back to your app. Paddle Checkout supports Apple Pay with no additional setup, along with PayPal, Google Pay, and other popular payment options.

• Subscription lifecycle management

  You can use Paddle to handle all parts of the subscription lifecycle, including updating payment methods and canceling subscriptions using the prebuilt customer portal. We cover that elsewhere in our docs.

Overview

Implement a payment workflow for your iOS app in six steps:

1. Map your product catalog

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

2. Add Paddle.js to your website

   Include Paddle.js on a page on your website, then handle the post-purchase redirect back to your app.

3. Create a transaction in Paddle

   Build logic in your backend to create a customer and a transaction in Paddle, ready for checkout.

4. Launch a checkout from your iOS app

   Add a button to your app that creates a transaction in Paddle and opens Paddle Checkout in Safari.

5. Handle fulfillment and provisioning using webhooks

   Process webhooks to fulfill purchases after a customer completes a checkout.

6. Take a test payment

   Verify your payment flow works correctly using test card details.

1. Map your product catalog

Before we implement Paddle Checkout, we need to set up our product catalog in Paddle to match the in-app purchases offered in-app.

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. Add Paddle.js to your website

Paddle.js is a lightweight JavaScript library that lets you build rich, integrated billing experiences using Paddle. We can use Paddle.js to securely open a checkout, capture payment information, and launch our success workflow.

When you add Paddle.js to a page, you can redirect to that page and append a _ptxn query parameter with the value of a transaction ID in Paddle to launch a checkout automatically.

You can create a new page, or add to an existing one like your homepage.

Include and initialize Paddle.js

Get a client-side token

Client-side tokens are for authenticating with Paddle in your frontend. We need one to securely open Paddle Checkout.

Build a success workflow

After users complete a purchase successfully, we need to bounce users back to our app.

To do this, we can use an event callback function. Paddle.js emits events throughout the checkout process when key things happen. An event callback function is some code that we run when a specific event occurs.

In our case, when Paddle.js emits a checkout.completed event, we're going to redirect to a screen in our app.

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1import { initializePaddle } from '@paddle/paddle-js';
2import { CheckoutEventNames, PaddleEventData } from '@paddle/paddle-js';
3
4const paddle = await initializePaddle({
5  token: 'CLIENT_SIDE_TOKEN',
6  eventCallback: (event: PaddleEventData) => {
7    if (event.name === CheckoutEventNames.CHECKOUT_COMPLETED) {
8
9      setTimeout(() => {
10        window.location.href = `myapp://example-redirect?transactionId=${event.data?.id}`;
11      }, 3000);
12    }
13  }
14});

When you're done, deploy your page to your website.

Set your default payment link

Your default payment link is a quick way to open Paddle Checkout for a transaction. It's also used in emails from Paddle that let customers manage purchases that are recurring. You need to set a default payment link before you can launch a checkout.

We'll set our default payment link to the page where we just added Paddle.js:

3. Create a transaction in Paddle

Transactions are the central billing entity in Paddle. They capture and calculate revenue for a customer purchase, and represent what they see when they open a checkout.

We'll create a transaction with details about what our customer is purchasing in our backend, then extract the checkout link to launch a checkout. We can use the transaction ID to match with a completed purchase later.

Install Paddle

First, add the Paddle SDK to your backend. Paddle has SDKs for Node.js, Python, PHP, and Go.

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1npm install @paddle/paddle-node-sdk

Get an API key

API keys are for authenticating with Paddle in your backend. We need one to create a transaction.

Set up the endpoint

You need to set up an endpoint to call from your iOS app to create the transaction in Paddle and return the checkout URL.

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1const express = require('express');
2const cors = require('cors');
3const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
4
5// Import Paddle SDK
6const { Paddle } = require('@paddle/paddle-node-sdk');
7
8// Express setup
9const app = express();
10const PORT = process.env.PORT || 3000;
11app.use(cors());
12app.use(bodyParser.json());
13app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
14require('dotenv').config();
15
16// Initialize Paddle
17// Assumes you have a Paddle API key in the .env file
18const paddle = new Paddle(process.env.PADDLE_API_KEY);
19
20app.post("/paddle/create-transaction", async (req, res) => {

Create a customer

If your user is signed in to your app, create a customer in Paddle for them.

Customers are lightweight entities that hold high-level details, like name and email address. They have related address and business entities.

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12app.use(bodyParser.json());
13app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({ extended: true }));
14require('dotenv').config();
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16// Initialize Paddle
17const paddle = new Paddle(process.env.PADDLE_API_KEY);
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19app.post("/paddle/create-transaction", async (req, res) => {
20  try {
21  // 1. Fetch or create a Paddle customer
22    const { userId } = req.body;
23    
24    const existingUser = await User.findOne({ where: { id: userId } });
25    
26    if (!existingUser) {
27      return res.status(404).json({ error: 'User not found' });
28    }
29    
30    // Check if customer already exists in Paddle
31    if (!existingUser.paddleCustomerId) {

We recommend storing the customer ID against your authentication provider, so you can associate the customer with their purchases in Paddle.

Create a transaction and extract the URL

To set up a checkout, create a transaction with:

• The customer ID of this customer.
• The items the customer is purchasing, which include the price ID we set up earlier and a quantity for each.

Once created, extract the checkout.url and return it to your app.

If you've integrated with RevenueCat for order fulfilment, include an object of custom data containing a unique identifier for RevenueCat.

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32        email: existingUser.email,
33        name: existingUser.name
34      });
35      
36      // Update the user with the Paddle customer ID
37      await existingUser.update({ paddleCustomerId: customer.id });
38      existingUser.paddleCustomerId = customer.id;
39    }
40
41    // 2. Create the transaction
42    // (Optional) Grab RevenueCat metadata field ID passed from the iOS app. 
43    // You can use any name to pass through. We use revenuecatId.
44    const { revenuecatId } = req.body;
45
46    // Grab the items from the request body
47    // This is an array of objects with a price_id and quantity for each item the customer is purchasing
48    const { items } = req.body;
49
50    if (!Array.isArray(items) || items.length === 0) {
51      return res.status(400).json({ error: "Items array is required and can't be empty" });

4. Launch a checkout

Remember to register a custom URL scheme for your redirect in your Info.plist file if you haven't already.

5. Handle fulfillment and provisioning

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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;
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11    // Listen for vital events from Paddle
12    switch (event_type) {
13      // 1. Record transactions in the database
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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 } });
56
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

6. Take a test payment

We're now ready to test! If you're using a sandbox account, you can take a test payment using our test card details:

Next steps

That's it. Now you've built a checkout flow using Paddle Billing, 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 creates a transaction, then passes that transaction to Paddle.js. You can also use 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.