Less than a quarter after we’ve opened our doors for business, we’re pleased to announce that effective March 31, 2010, all Palm webOS developers will be able to sell their applications in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, and Spain. We want to use this post to highlight some important details of the program. Check the links below for full details.
In a nutshell, you can now sell your existing and new applications in many new regions. Commerce in Mexico, Canada and France is coming soon. In anticipation for the launches in these countries, you can pre-select Mexico, Canada and France for paid app distribution starting today.
In addition to expanding the countries in which we support e-commerce, we’ve also started accepting applications for distribution in France in anticipation of our upcoming launch on the French wireless carrier, SFR.
When you log into the Palm Developer Center and check out your apps summary page, you’ll notice a few changes. Starting today, all apps — both ones already in distribution and new ones — can be updated for distribution in the regions listed above. When submitting paid apps you can select “German” for Germany, “Spanish” for Spain and “French” for France or Canada and still upload English app and metadata — with the exception of app category names (see the FAQs below for a translation guide for category names).
Revenue treatment remains fundamentally the same. You will receive 70% of the sales price and will be paid via Paypal. While consumers will be purchasing apps using $USD in the US, British Pounds in the UK, and Euros in Ireland, Germany, and France; you will be paid in $USD for North America sales and Euros for European sales. You’ll be able to track all of your sales by country by accessing the sales reports in the Developer Center.
If you want to participate in the ecommerce program, include the appropriate tax information upon developer registration. Existing developers can edit their information at any time. Tax information should be for the country in which your business resides. If you have multiple tax residencies, you will need a separate account for each taxable entity. If you are located in the European Union, the VAT registration number that you provide should be linked to the country of residence for which you are submitting (i.e. French address then French VAT registration number). If you have multiple Palm developer accounts, you should submit your app(s) using the account(s) that will receive the revenue share payment. If you choose, you can submit different versions of the same app to each account to segregate your revenue share payments by geography.
Outside of the US where commerce is already enabled, consumers who want to purchase applications will be able to set up their payment account with the 1.4.1 OS update that will be released today in the UK, Ireland, Germany, and Spain. In our experience, even though the OS is an over-the-air update that is pushed to devices, it takes a handful of weeks for the majority of users to adopt and install the OS update.
If you are not yet registered with the Palm Developer Center, full details on how to sign up and get started are available here.
Information on the distribution program are available in the Palm webOS Application Distribution Program Agreement.
Further details about the program are published in an International E-Commerce FAQ.
If you have questions that aren’t answered there, please contact us at pdc@palm.com.
