Facebook® Application Development For Dummies®

Selling Your Creations with Facebook Credits

One tool that should get more and more valuable as more users use it is a product called Facebook Credits. Credits are a currency of sorts, which Facebook sells to users to make purchases within games and applications on Facebook. As I write this, the cost is 10 cents per credit, the minimum credit purchase being 15 credits for $1.50. You can buy more credits either in the applications that use credits, or if you go into your account settings and choose Payments, you can buy them there as well. (See Figure 15-21.) Credits will get more and more popular as more applications and Web sites implement them across Facebook and the Web. Just before I wrote this, Walmart and other stores started selling Facebook Credits gift cards in stores. Facebook Credits could become as popular as PayPal and other forms of online payment, so consider applying yourself to the program. In fact, Facebook has started placing restrictions on games within Facebook, asking developers of games to use Facebook Credits as the main form of payment within their apps.

Figure 15-21: You can add Facebook Credits in your account settings on Facebook.

Building Credits into your application

Building a payment solution into your application is as simple as calling an FB.ui dialog box call — with a few complexities you need to take care of first. To accept payments through Facebook ...