Drive Buyer Confidence with Try Before You Buy

To help support the growth and health of the Meta Quest developer ecosystem, our team is working to provide you with new ways to monetize your apps in the Meta Quest Store. Our research suggests that buyer hesitancy may impact conversion rates in the Store, as people often want to know what the app experience will look and feel like before deciding to purchase. So today, we’re launching a new self-service feature to help you drive buyer confidence: Try Before You Buy (TBYB).

This feature lets people try your apps for free for a limited time, and it can help you mitigate buyer hesitancy and drive conversion. TBYB will be available for developers with apps listed in the Meta Quest Store and can be found in the Developer Dashboard App Manager. Let’s dive into how TBYB works and some best practices to keep in mind.

TBYB doesn’t require any code changes, and it was designed to make setting up your trial an easy and intuitive process. It lets you choose the duration of your trial, with a minimum of 15 minutes and a maximum of 30 minutes. You can also choose what percentage of Store audiences will be eligible to see your TBYB offering.

People have 30 days to use their allotted time in your app after starting their trial, after which they will be unable to launch your app without purchasing it first. Currently, all trial experiences start at the beginning of a game or app experience, but if a user decides to purchase your app after starting their trial, they can pick up where they left off without needing to start over.

With TBYB’s self-service model, we want to help your trial offering make an impact as quickly as possible. To accomplish this, we’ve enabled trials to go live immediately if they’re created between the hours of 10:00 am and 3:00 pm PT). TBYB offerings created outside of these hours will go live at 10:00 am PT the following business day.

Our platform features a diverse range of apps, so we’ve designed TBYB to help you create a TBYB trial that fits your strategy needs—but it’s important to know if your app is suitable for TBYB before offering it to everyone in the Store.

The first trial you set up will be referred to as your “initial test period.” This test is important for determining how TBYB impacts your sales and whether it’s a good fit for your app. To help mitigate potential risk, your initial test period will run for a maximum of 30 days. After the initial test period, you can enable TBYB for a longer period of time.

You can visit the TBYB tab in the Developer Dashboard at any time to view analytics that will help you evaluate whether TBYB supports your strategy. Two particularly useful metrics are “Without TBYB Conversion Rate” and “With TBYB Conversion Rate,” which identify what percentage of people purchased your app, either with or without starting a free trial first. If “With TBYB Conversion Rate” is significantly lower than “Without TBYB Conversion Rate,” an app’s game loop or genre may not be optimal for TBYB.

Before you set up your initial test period, it’s important to know roughly how long it takes the average player to progress through the various stages of your game. This information can help you set a trial duration that aligns with your app’s gameplay, such as ending the trial on a cliffhanger or stopping point that rewards audiences. If supported, we recommend a stopping point that gives your users a reason to return. This can take the form of an achievement, level completion, ability unlock, etc.

If you plan to enable TBYB for a specific duration of time, increasing the audience can help produce statistically significant results faster. We don’t recommend using your results to inform decisions until they have achieved statistical significance, which is why we’ve set up TBYB to run for a minimum of seven days.

If you enable TBYB, your app will be featured in a dedicated TBYB shelf on the Store homepage. To achieve better visibility for your app in the Store, consider using the A/B Testing Tool to ensure your cover art is driving clicks to your app’s product detail page. Note: The initial TBYB test period and A/B tests cannot be run simultaneously.

For more information on Try Before You Buy, check out our documentation.