Shops & Inventory

Flock’s economy has three pieces:

Shops — collections of purchasable items.
Shop items — individual offers with a price and currency.
Inventory — a record of what each player has purchased.

A purchase debits the player’s wallet and records an inventory entry:

Shop item ──purchase──▶ wallet debit ──▶ inventory entry

Every purchase creates its own entry, so buying the same item twice gives you two. Each entry carries a server-set status and used_at, both read-only — there is no call in either SDK that marks an entry used. A purchase is money-safe. It is never retried after an ambiguous failure and never queued offline, so it cannot double-charge. Inventory is always fetched fresh; the catalog is cached and served offline, so treat a displayed price as advisory until the purchase succeeds.

A purchase does not grant the item’s contents. A shop item has a name, a status, a price and a currency — there is no field describing what it gives, so the server has nothing to credit. Buying a “1000 Gold” pack debits the price and records the entry; the gold is not added.Granting the contents from the game client is the only option today, and it is not safe for anything you care about: the client can be modified to grant any amount, and a dropped connection after the debit leaves the player charged with nothing to show for it. Server-side rewards are tracked as a feature request.

Dashboard
Unity
Unreal

Configure shops and their items for a game version in the dashboard — set prices, currencies, and availability.

Use the SDK’s shop methods to list the shops and items available for your game version, then make a purchase for the signed-in player. PurchaseAsync defaults to the signed-in player and returns the inventory entry it created.

PlayerInventory entry = await FlockClient.Instance.Shop.PurchaseAsync("shop-item-id");

PaginatedResponse<PlayerInventory> owned =
    await FlockClient.Instance.Shop.GetPlayerInventoryAsync();

A declined purchase throws — catch FlockException and check ErrorCode for FlockErrorCode.ShopInsufficientFunds to tell “can’t afford it” apart from a network failure.

Browse with the Flock | Shop nodes, or the shop provider in C++. An item’s free-form data and stats read by dotted path, so no JSON parsing node is needed.

A Flock Purchase node in a Blueprint graph — Purchase by picking a generated item — the ID is baked in and cannot be mistyped.

Sdk->GetShopProvider()->Purchase(ItemId,
    [](TFlockResult<FFlockPlayerInventory> Entry)
    {
        if (!Entry.bSuccess && Entry.Error.Code == EFlockErrorCode::ShopInsufficientFunds)
        {
            // The server declined — show the player, don't retry.
        }
    });

See Currencies & Wallets for the balances that back purchases.

Getting Started

Concepts

SDKs

Features

Reference

Shops & Inventory