How can developer test with different regions?

Wait, i am confused (again). I just realized i never knew in the first place how Channel Store decides on what region/currency to use for billing purposes - and also i presume to filter down listings by regional availability.

My hunch was wrong and there is no regional choice available when creating new user account, nor when installing new player.
So how is it done?

"EnTerr" wrote:
I do want to test all that...

I'm struggling with this exact problem right now. I'm displaying the cost returned by GetCatalog to the user, but I really have no idea what's going to happen in different regions. It would be nice to get some clarification on what symbols may or may not be returned, especially since I'm using a font that may or may not agree with conventions for the different currency symbols.

I'm guessing it's not possible to select a region for one's box, but there needs to be a way to test this sort of thing.

-JT

You would need to create a separate Roku User using an ip address from the region you are going to test - so you would, at least for the initial setup, need a VPN connection for each region you are targeting. Once an account is setup, devices linked to that account should be associated with that region.

We unfortunately do not have a way to test multiple regions otherwise (short of us manually going in and changing the region associated with an account - not very scaleable).

- Joel

Thanks RokuJoel! That clarifies for me the status-quo.

So one would need separate "regional" user accounts - and in my case particularly will need to reset to factory and re-link player every time (cannot dedicate a player per each account because of custom provisioning). Or i can wish "touch luck" to those <10% Roku users that are outside US, whatever is clever. Hmm, choices, choices... i'll figure it out. Good to know the limits

Like Joel said, the Roku account and box gets set (and locked) to the Region store based on your ip address at creation so you would have to have a Roku account for each market that you want to test. You can change the box's region with a factory reset to initialize the box set up again. Also, you would need a credit card with an address within that market to make test payments.

The easier process would be to start a test group and pay some users from each markets to carry out your testing requirements.

"Tajson" wrote:
The easier process would be to start a test group and pay some users from each markets to carry out your testing requirements.

Great point! It's not that it did not occur to me but it's a hullabaloo i hoped to avoid.
Nor do i have budget to pay, this is a "church mouse" operation.
Still, seems like the best course of action - thank you for saying it aloud to re-consider!

So. Any brave souls with Roku 3/Roku 4 player and account from Mexico, Canada, UK or Australia?
If willing to take the adventure of a simple in-app purchase, shoot me a PM with your email address (on Roku account) and country. The purchase will be free. But if somehow charged, i'll fix it by refunding - or paypal-ing 2x the amount.

I'm going to go ahead and set up accounts in all the regions. I've already created a UK account. It will probably take most of the day, but it may be easier than finding volunteers in every region. I'm mostly interested in how the prices are returned for IAPs. I'll post my findings later.

-JT

Well, I think I'm going to abandon the multiple account approach. It appears that the 'cost' returned by GetCatalog is in GBP for every region I've tried outside of the U.S. I thought this might have something to do with me creating the UK account first, but I just went through the whole process in French and I still see prices in GBP. There must be a bug someplace because when I actually go through the purchase process it shows the price in Euros (e.g., the price returned from GetCatalog is £0.69 and the price displayed to be charged is 0,79 €.

If anyone in Ireland or France wants to give it a try, let me know.

One other note: the cost string returned for the test purchases when side-loaded doesn't match the string returned for a packaged (private or public) channel. The test purchase string displays something like $0.99 USD and the real cost just shows $0.99. There's no GBP appended to the real cost either when it is returned from GetCatalog in a packaged channel for any of the regions I tried. I was going to suggest that there be a method of requesting the test purchases' information for different regions, but if the information for the U.S. region doesn't match the real thing, what's the point?

I think I'll let the <10% or so foreign customers be on their own. 😞 I think the worst thing that can happen is that the price I display to the user is garbled and/or in the wrong currency.

-JT

renojim -
Side-loaded app is hopelessly stubbed re billing, no good.
See viewtopic.php?f=34&t=95553 where i advocate to make it usable.

Re setting Region, my current understanding is it gets set once-and-for-all during initial user account creation based on geo-IP at the time of creation. In other words, it does not matter what language you do player setup in - when associated with account, it will inherit account's region.

For comparative purposes, here are my results "documenting" roChannelStore existing behavior for US account: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=95592

"EnTerr" wrote:
Re setting Region, my current understanding is it gets set once-and-for-all during initial user account creation based on geo-IP at the time of creation. In other words, it does not matter what language you do player setup in - when associated with account, it will inherit account's region.

Yeah, I know. I used a VPN to "locate" myself in France. It was pretty clear the Roku website thought I was in France when my account was setup. It wasn't as clear for the account I setup from Ireland. One of the "what's my IP" sites thought I was in Canada, so I can't be sure where Roku thought I was. I should have checked what country Roku automatically filled in for my address, but I didn't think of it. Either way, GetCatalog returned a cost in GBP when I linked that account to my SE.

Doing a factory reset on my SE and linking it to my "French" account still returned the "cost" in GBP from GetCatalog. I'm guessing that it's a bug in roChannelStore that isn't seen unless the string returned from GetCatalog is actually displayed to the user. Until recently I just hard-coded the prices in USD. The actual screens from the purchase process handled by roChannelStore would, I assume, display the correct price in the correct currency that the user would be charged. I thought it would be cleaner and more professional to display the true price in the user's currency on my screens, but other than hard-coding the strings and doing an update if/when exchange rates are updated (does Roku ever update them?) I don't see a way to do it.

-JT