Roku Developer Program

[destruk]

Hello - 
Just a few things -
1 - It would be great if we could create billing items through the roku channel using the billing system on the fly as needed.  Using Paypal or Stripe we can send a unique name, charge information, customer information, notes, custom amounts as needed for each charge.
2 - As a follow up - how does anyone charge anything except x.99 cents for anything?  If my customer needs to pay tax where they are we end up eating that cost, or we have to cheat the customer out of some change for a $1.50 item by charging $1.99.
3 - It could be my internet/browser, but I've cleared my cache and tried different computers and adding a product works ok, but submitting it for approval times out every 1-2 items so I have to close the browser, reopen the page, re-login, and add a product over and over to get all of them in there.
4 - The current system of assigning products to channels is lacking - I have to individually select each item and then assign it to an existing channel in the list of available channels we develop ONE product at a time.  For something you are making 20% on for each sale it should be a priority to make sure it works and is easier for people to use as your revenue depends on us using it.  I would think having a spreadsheet type system available with checkboxes on one screen with all the items available to assign or remove from channels would be an improvement over this current system.
5 - The ability to say, upload a CSV file and have your back-end parse and sanitize it to generate hundreds of items at a time would be necessary for most larger channels.

For your consideration...once every possible option is set up, and assigned to channels, it probably works just fine - but these initial setup steps should probably be pre-set instead of needing to be created by each individual Roku billing developer.  It took 2 hours to create and approve 50 products, and then another hour to dual-assign them to a second channel app.  A "Duplicate ALL available for channel X" option would save time there.

[EnTerr]

"destruk" wrote:
1 - It would be great if we could create billing items through the roku channel using the billing system on the fly as needed.  Using Paypal or Stripe we can send a unique name, charge information, customer information, notes, custom amounts as needed for each charge.

I don't think that will ever happen - i mean look at app pricing in iOS/Amazon, Roku's is kinda like that. You have to create product SKUs manually first, then they may be reviewed/approved and only then used - with no ad-hoc charges.

2 - As a follow up - how does anyone charge anything except x.99 cents for anything?  If my customer needs to pay tax where they are we end up eating that cost, or we have to cheat the customer out of some change for a $1.50 item by charging $1.99.

Again look at iOS/Amazon - can only charge in increments. Regarding sales tax/VAT you would have a point regarding differences between countries - the assumption here is that if say for some country in Europe VAT has to be accessed, that was already calculated in the "prix fixe" so that what the developer received won't be affected by whether the country demands sales tax or not. There are "complications" here however, for example app price conversion is not as simple as currency conversion, since PPP has to be taken into account. But there are also "simplifications", since Amazon and Apple do this balancing act all the time, so a company can just copy&paste their pricing and trust it is well-balanced. I am not sure how Roku's fairing here though - i haven't checked recently.

[destruk]

I think the title of this thread is "Roku Billing requests" -- Ideas to make Roku Billing better.
Whether they do it or not is up to them.  With Paypal and Stripe we can bill anything we like, and I think most people selling stuff want to be able to set their own prices.  So while having a library of hundreds of movies, is it too much to ask that the billing charge reflects the movie name that was purchased, at the price we want to sell it for, without requiring days to manually enter and get titles approved for sale?  And hey, it's not all or nothing, one improvement is better than no improvement.  And they are simply requests.

I don't expect anything to change but I couldn't, in good conscience, simply accept what is here without mentioning a word I wrote.  It could be better in multiple ways - so I posted this.