An article from Zippy Cart.

Apple made a big announcement last week that will change the face of ecommerce for application developers. Developers can now offer their users the option to purchase extra content or features within a free application. Currently developers on the platform have to spend extra time and effort to create a lite version of their product, which is free, and a separate paid version. This not only clogs up the Apple iTunes App store with excess apps to browse through, but it makes it more complicated from a development and maintenance standpoint.

The in-app purchase feature will completely eliminate those annoying lite apps from the store so you can only have one version of the app that you upgrade if you desire. Having this additional functionality will allow developers to offer extra levels or new tools to an existing app, but these add-on features can only be offered via payment for now. This means app developers will have to charge the typically 99 cent minimum for any type of upgrade and cannot offer the user free upgrades within the app. Users can still easily update their app in the app store if they want to get new free features, but some want to see the feature in app as well.

Apple app developers are very excited as the future for them looks brighter and more profitable by giving them more flexibility to monetize their app and up-sell users. No longer will they have to only use ads as their sole means of generating revenue since they can offer nice paid add-ons from within the app. They are also excited that the removal of the lite apps will make it so much easier to navigate through all of the choices in the app store which could lead to higher conversion rates from some developers.

Stay tuned into the iTunes app store so you can watch this ecommerce shift take place over the next couple months.