Like the title says, is a merchant account mandatory for testing the IAP logic of an app. The app has a set of fixed items a user can permanently purchase. These items must be added to the In-app section of the g-play console (I’m following the README from:
https://github.com/googlesamples/android-play-billing
This sample can't be run as-is. You have to create your own
application instance in the Developer Console and modify this
sample to point to it. Here is what you must do:
ON THE GOOGLE PLAY DEVELOPER CONSOLE
1. Create an application on the Developer Console, available at
https://play.google.com/apps/publish/.
2. Copy the application's public key (a base-64 string). You can find this in
the "Services & APIs" section under "Licensing & In-App Billing".
IN THE CODE
3. Open MainActivity.java, find the declaration of base64EncodedPublicKey and
replace the placeholder value with the public key you retrieved in Step 2.
4. Change the sample's package name to your package name. To do that, update the
package name in AndroidManifest.xml and correct the references (especially the
references to the R object).
5. Export an APK, signing it with your PRODUCTION (not debug) developer certificate.
BACK TO THE GOOGLE PLAY DEVELOPER CONSOLE
6. Upload your APK to Google Play for Alpha Testing.
7. Make sure to add your test account (the one you will use to test purchases)
to the "testers" section of your app. Your test account CANNOT BE THE SAME AS
THE PUBLISHER ACCOUNT. If it is, your purchases won't go through.
8. Under In-app Products, create MANAGED in-app items with these IDs:
premium, gas
Set their prices to 1 dollar. You can choose a different price if you like.
9. Under In-app Products, create SUBSCRIPTION items with these IDs:
infinite_gas_monthly, infinite_gas_yearly
Set their prices to 1 dollar and the billing recurrence to monthly for
infinite_gas_monthly and yearly for infinite_gas_yearly. To prevent being charged
while testing, set the trial period to 7 days.
10. Publish your APK to the Alpha channel. Wait 2-3 hours for Google Play to process the APK
If you don't wait for Google Play to process the APK, you might see errors where Google Play
says that "this version of the application is not enabled for in-app billing" or something
similar. Ensure that the In-App products move to the "Active" state within the console before
testing.
TEST THE CODE
11. Install the APK signed with your PRODUCTION certificate, to a
test device [*].
12. Run the app.
13. Make purchases using the test account you added in Step 7.
Upon creating a managed item, I get the following message:
Your app doesn't have any in-app products yet.
To add in-app products, you need to set up a Google Payments merchant account.
Set up a merchant account
Is there any fee required (either one time payment or subscription) require for creating a merchant account? I did not find anything related in google’s tos.