How to verify a iTunes Store receipt for in-app purchase

Question

First of all, I am not talking about calling https://buy.itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt/, instead, what I am asking is how to verify an iTuneStore receipt from one of our users.

We have in-app purchase in our app, and we verify in-game receipts on our server before we grant the product. However, this particular user claimed that he got charged by iTunes store but did not get the purchased products, and sent us his receipt as a proof.

So I am wondering if there is anyway we can verify such a receipt. There is "receipt no" and "order number" in the iTunes Store receipt, however, with in-game receipt verification we get transaction_id, and these numbers are quite different. Any idea?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You should contact Apple's developer support. I doubt there is a way to verify it by yourself if you can't find a respective transaction in your own systems.

Answer 2

There is no manual way to do this, unless you can somehow get the receipt data from his device, in which case you can use Apple's API that you mentioned to verify his claims. If what he says is true then suggest him to claim a refund and then re-purchase. He should be able to do this here.

Answer 3

There is source code at https://github.com/roddi/ValidateStoreReceipt/blob/master/validatereceipt.m which will validate a receipt, and let you parse it and dump out all the transactions. If the IAP transaction is there you would see it.

You'd have to write a special-purpose iOS app which uses that code and feed it the receipt. It seems like a lot of work.

Answer 4

I am not talking about calling https://buy.itunes.apple.com/verifyReceipt/

Actually u have online receipt verification tool, accessible by link above. There is no better way to verify Your receipt. Offline verification is possible, but if even it succeeded, nobody can give 100% warranty that Your receipt is valid(maybe just same signature, but still fake one).

Apple processing every purchase on its servers and if it successful, receipt saved to database. If u want to check receipt u must access to that database and request for Your receipt. So You have a tool, but don't want to use it? No reliable way then.