The purchaseDate timestamp on Apple's renewal orders is always 8 hours later than the time the notification is received.

Hello everyone.

I encountered a problem when integrating Apple Pay. I obtained all the renewal orders through the Apple interface, and their purchaseDate is 8 hours later than the actual payment time. Why is this happening?

According to the documentation, the purchaseDate value provided by Apple is a millisecond timestamp that represents the actual payment time of the user, so theoretically there shouldn’t be any timezone issues.

This works well in client-initiated subscriptions, but in renewal scenarios, the purchaseDate becomes unreliable. Could this be due to some configuration in the configuration center?

For example, I actually received an Apple notification at 1746686911000 (2025-05-08 06:48:31 Etc/GMT).

However, the data returned by the Apple interface is as shown below:

{
    "appAccountToken": "xxxx",
    "bundleId": "xxxx",
    "currency": "GBP",
    "environment": "Production",
    "expiresDate": 1762616831000,
    "inAppOwnershipType": "PURCHASED",
    "isUpgraded": false,
    "offerDiscountType": "",
    "offerIdentifier": "",
    "offerType": 0,
    "originalPurchaseDate": 1746456432000,
    "originalTransactionId": "320002311698411",
    "price": 39990,
    "productId": "xxxx",
    "purchaseDate": 1746715631000,
    "quantity": 1,
    "revocationDate": 0,
    "revocationReason": 0,
    "signedDate": 1746687092825,
    "storefront": "GBR",
    "storefrontId": "xxxx",
    "subscriptionGroupIdentifier": "xxxx",
    "transactionId": "320002315815857",
    "transactionReason": "RENEWAL",
    "type": "Auto-Renewable Subscription",
    "webOrderLineItemId": "320001062124562"
}

You can see that the purchaseDate is 1746715631000 (2025-05-08 14:48:31 Etc/GMT), which is even later than the current time.

Can someone explain this behavior that is inconsistent with the documentation, or did I do something wrong?

I would be very grateful for any help anyone can provide.