Activate Apple Pay and Google Pay for your consumers

August 16th, 2022

SHARE is a protocol built on blockchain that enables creators to choose the price per stream of their audio or video content, distribute the content directly to consumers, make it accessible on any web application, and receive payments instantly when their content is streamed. SHARE has a wide variety of applications including music, video, and podcasts.

Introduction

We’re in the early stages of Web3 technology adoption, and there are hurdles for consumers to engage and use Web3 tools. This is why it’s important that consumers have an option to use the power of Web3 wallets or use more traditional payment methods to pay for content. When you are a creator using the SHARE Protocol (SHARE) to distribute your content you can make a choice for how you want consumers to pay. If you choose to enable the Apple Pay and Google Pay feature, consumers won’t need to have or connect a Web3 wallet in order to purchase access to your content on the FORMLESS SHARE Decentralized Application (Formless dApp). Other streaming applications built on top of the protocol may not support Apple Pay and Google Pay, in which case digital currency payments are always an available option.

This article explains the process and requirements to activate Apple Pay and Google Pay features for your consumers and provides some information and examples to consider.

Prerequisites

Review the following articles to understand the requirements for creating content.

Requirements and considerations

While the Apple Pay and Google Pay feature is optional, there are some requirements and information to consider before enabling the feature.

Traditional payment processors have a transaction value minimum requirement that must be met in order to process transactions, meaning that we can only offer this feature for content that is priced equal to or above 17 cents ($.17).
In addition to gas (a fee to process the blockchain transaction), the price your consumer will incur when they use the feature will be higher than the price you set for your content. The price will include a fee of $.30 + 7.9% of the transaction value. These are fees that are passed on to SHARE for the convenience of paying with Apple Pay or Google Pay, so we’re passing them on to the consumer.

Example 1: You have a song that you price at $.10 for one month of access, want to give your consumers the option to use Apple Pay and Google Pay to listen to the song. In this case:

The content price is less than the minimum of 17 cents. $.10 < $.17.
Apple Pay and Google Pay cannot be enabled as an option for your consumers.

Example 2: You have a video that you price at $1.00 for one day of access, and you want to give your consumers the option to use Apple Pay or Google Pay to view the video. In this case:

The content price exceeds the minimum requirement of 17 cents. $1.00 > $.17.
The SHARE protocol fee is 5%. This is the standard transaction fee that the consumer pays to access the content using the protocol.
Gas to process the blockchain portion of the transaction is a nominal $.001.
The cost for the consumer to view the video will be ($1.00(.05))+ $.30 + (7.9% * $1.35) + $.001.
The result is a total cost to the consumer of $1.45. This is an additional $.45 cost to the consumer.

Example 3. You have a video that you price at $10.00 for one month of access, and you want to give your consumers the option to use Apple Pay and Google Pay to view the video. In this case:

The content price exceeds the minimum requirement of 17 cents. $10.00 > $.17.
The SHARE protocol fee is 5%. This is the standard transaction fee that the consumer pays to access the content using the protocol.
Gas to process the blockchain portion of the transaction is a nominal $.001.
The cost for the consumer to view the video will be ($10.00(.05))+ $.30 + (7.9% * $10.80) + $.001.
The result is a total cost to the consumer of $11.35. This is an additional $1.35 cost to the consumer.

You can see that the consumer pays a premium for the content if they choose to pay using Apple Pay or Google Pay, and depending on your use case and how you’re pricing your content it may make more financial sense in some cases rather than others. In Example 2, the cost for using Apple Pay or Google Pay represents a much higher proportion of the total cost compared to Example 3. In all cases, as the price of access increases, the portion of the total cost that the consumer pays decreases.

We recommend considering higher access times to justify the additional fees associated with Apple Pay and Google Pay. For example, rather than charging per stream, consider what the price would be for one day or one week of access to create an attractive value proposition. It's completely up to you to consider and decide on the right value proposition for your audience.

Activation

Activating Apple Pay and Google Pay is part of the process when you create a smart contract for your content and deploy it to the blockchain.

Navigate to https://app.formless.xyz/create in your web browser. Here you’ll see a series of steps where you will input information that is used to create the details of your smart contract.

When you reach the “Price for Access” section you’ll input the access terms to your content. This includes whether or not consumers can purchase access using Apple Pay and Google Pay. The section looks like this:

By default, the Apple Pay and Google Pay feature is disabled. To enable the feature select (check the box) “Enable Apple Pay and Google Pay”. This will allow consumers to purchase access to your content using Apple Pay and Google Pay, and they won’t need to connect a Web3 wallet in order to purchase access to your content.

Royalty Payouts

Using the Apple Pay and Google Pay feature does not affect your payout. You still collect the entire amount that you specified in the “Price for Access” field.