SQUARE ONLINE REPRICING
create a robust and value-driven Square Online pricing & packaging
EXPERTISE
UX Research, Design, Strategy
PLATFORMS
Responsive web
DELIVERABLES
UI, UX, Strategy
in addition to increasing lifetime value and annual revenue, our goal is to simplify our plans and create value-based flows that drive engagement and conversions. We also want to standardize patterns and experiences across square online.
The problem
From a business strategy standpoint, we offer 4 plans plus a largely unadvertised “Personal plan” which has a similar feature set as our Free plan. From a user experience standpoint, it’s unclear what the benefit is to upgrade especially when there’s no clear path to downgrading in the future. This led us to identify some additional challenges.
Our plans are confusing - with 5 plans it’s hard to convey the differences between each and spreads us too thin in terms of feature distribution
We’re underpriced compared to the competition - competitor pricing reveals a willingness to pay well beyond our various SaaS tiers even for basic online ordering functionality
There are many inconsistencies in upgrade and downgrade experiences as well as feature discoverability within the product.
The old pricing plans plus a Personal plan at $6/mo.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES
Honest and transparent
Our pricing should be straightforward, easy to understand and honest
Lead with the benefit & value
Always help the seller understand what the value they will be getting from the feature or upgrade. Where possible, allow users to preview or provide rich interactions of the features upfront.
Create seamless experiences
Preserve data and settings where possible so a seller’s business remain accessible regardless of downgrade and/or re-upgrade.
part I: upgrades
As teams tackle business strategy challenges, design looked to improve our in-product experiences. First starting with standardizing upgrade patterns and experiences. Our upgrade entrypoints were inconsistent, hidden and didn’t provide enough value to drive conversions. We worked with the design systems team to create a set of components, interactions and copy that would be used across Square Online as well as the largely Square organization. We then worked with each product team to redesign their v1 paywall.
V1 upgrades
For v1, our upgrade experience includes a blue pill with the label “Upgrade”, a main CTA, and a contextual modal. These decisions while small, were intentional. We wanted to leverage existing components to start as we worked with the design systems team to explore alternatives. We also knew we needed a generic label copy instead of plan specific copy like “Plus” or “Premium” given that there were many different plans across the Square platform. Lastly, we wanted to make incremental efforts in providing contextual descriptions and gifs.
part II: downgrades
The next experience to consider was downgrades. At the time, there was no way for a seller to downgrade on the platform. They had to call into Customer Support and after they’ve been downgraded, we didn’t remove paid features. Our goal for this workstream was to create a transparent and consistent downgrade flow and enable sellers to easily manage their subscriptions. But there were a few challenges given the nature of our business, audience and features. Our first step was to split this into 2 experiences, explicit and implicit. Then we split the features into 2 groups, features that needed to be replaced (namely custom domain) and features that can be turned on and off without significant impact to a seller’s site.
EXPLICIT
An explicit downgrade is when a seller has clear intent to downgrade and has actively selected a lower-tiered plan. Based on feature usage, we introduced a series of dynamic modals that communicated the loss of features, when and what happens as a result of downgrading.
For custom domain users, we show an additional modal that asks sellers to select a subdomain to redirect their site to after the downgrade. For all other features, we re-paywall the feature and preserve as much data as we can.
And lastly, tying it back to our principle of honest and transparent, we also created a notification strategy, both in-product and email, to set clear expectations.
An example where we save the locations a seller has setup but disabling the ability to accept orders and re-paywall the feature.
IMPLICIT
An implicit downgrade is when a seller has not shown clear intent to downgrade, like when a payment method or free trial has expired. For this use case, we provide a grace period in which a seller can take action to correct the issue. Once the grace period ends, we automatically downgrade a seller’s account.
The challenge comes with custom domain. We were careful to strike the right balance between creating a seamless experience and assuming a seller’s intent. After many discussions, we decided the best solution was to unpublish a seller’s site and create a more contextual 404 page.
results & next steps
We’ve recently ramped to 100% of US sellers and have been seeing positive results in conversions. We’ll continue monitoring the data as we launch to international markets. For design, we’re working on v2 concepts for both upgrade and downgrades, specifically moments where we can add delight and make it less transactional. Where can we incorporate winback moments? Leverage data to further demonstrate value and impact of downgrading and upgrading? Can we push on the upgrade patterns potentially exploring icons and interactions? Where can we preserve even more data especially when it comes to site design and customizations?