If your app has purchasable content and you want to offer a free preview of that content to the app user, you can use the metered access feature to make your life easier. Note that this feature requires TP19 or higher.
Principle
The metered access feature makes it easier to create links between preview and paid collections. The app will check whether the user has access to either the preview or the purchased collection. As a publisher you have complete control over the content that will be shown to the user because the linking is performed between collections. These collections can contain most types of Twixl content items*.
Workflow
1.Enabling the metered access feature
To be able to use the metered access feature, you have to enable this function in the app settings.
How:
Go to app settings via:
Main > Edit Application > Application Behavior > check the ‘Metered Access’ box > Save
Note that enabling metered access cannot be reversed. So always make sure to test this in a development app first!
2. Defining collections as purchase or preview
Once the metered access feature has been enabled, an extra ‘preview’ option appears when creating or editing a collection. When creating or editing a collection you have 3 options:
- Free of charge
- Purchase
- Preview
When a collection is marked as Preview, you will be able to link it to an existing Purchase Collection in Collection Details while creating the collection. A collection marked as Purchase will offer the possibility to link to an existing Preview collection via the dropdown. Linking the collection is not mandatory. You can link to a collection afterwards too. You can complete all collection fields as usual and save it.
Whether a collection is free, preview or purchase is shown in the Type column in collection overview in Home or via Main > Collections. If there is already a collection linked to this collection, will also be shown in the 'Linked To' column in this overview.
3. Linking collections to a preview or purchase collection
Some possibilities to create links between collections:
- Via edit in a collection and select the matching collection
- By creating a new collection and selecting the matching collection
- By clicking on ‘Create’ in the Collection Details of a collection and creating a new collection
4. Adding content to the collections
In Preview collections you can add your content as usual. For preview collections, the type of content items that are allowed are:
- HTML Article
- Twixl Article
- Image
- Movie
- Vimeo Movie
- YouTube Movie
- Inline Web Viewer
- Embedded Web Viewer
- Placeholder
- Weblink
This means you are free to provide preview content that maximises purchase attraction.
5. Adding purchase button
How you integrate and design the purchase button is also completely customisable. If you create a Twixl article (InDesign), you can integrate the "tp-paywall://" scheme via the Twixl Plugin in your design. This will call the paywall function and once the content has been purchased, the app will only show the purchase collection. After the purchase of a pcollection has been completed, its preview collection will no longer appear.
Other content types will require to add a web link containing a "tp-paywall://" scheme.
Click here for more information on these custom url schemes.
Final check:
Before the go live of your publication, make sure both your content items both in the purchase and the preview collection are in the published status.