Plans: Annual plan monthly rate no longer reflects discounted rate as suggested in tooltip

[jjchrisdiehl]

Steps to reproduce the behavior

1. Go to https://wordpress.com/plans/[site] on a site with an existing annual plan
2. Note the 'billed annually' copy with a tooltip icon compared to the display plan price

What I expected to happen

The tooltip suggests that the customer will receive a discount from the full price as shown here -

I expected to see the discounted price displayed and a tooltip that explained how this discounted price is achieved (ie by applying their current plan value towards the upgrade).

What actually happened

Instead, I see the full price displayed with a tooltip suggesting that some sort of discount would be applied without actually reflecting the discounted/prorated pricing.

Context

Originally reported here:
p1626978531261300-slack-C0117V2PCAE

Looks like the change to the current iteration was done here #26142

Does this happen on simple or atomic sites or both?

Both

Level of impact (Does it block purchases? Does it affect more than just one site?)

Affects all sites, but low impact

[DavidRothstein]

Earlier discussion: If the price is not (intended to be) shown crossed-out anymore, there's probably no need for the tooltip.

[southp]

I think the easiest way moving forward for now is to keep the tooltip as it is and bring back the crossed-out price. What do you think, @DavidRothstein @niranjan-uma-shankar @paulbonahora ? If we agree, I'll start prioritizing it :)

[niranjan-uma-shankar]

bring back the crossed-out price

+1 and I believe these are the scenarios here:

1. If user is subscribed to a monthly plan and is on the monthly plans tab OR user is subscribed to an annual plan and is on the annual plans tab, we'll show the crossed-out price with pro-rata credits applied.
2. What should we do when the user switches tabs? So, user subscribed to a monthly plan views the annual plans tab, can we show the pro-rated credits for the annual plans, or is there a concern that this could be a confusing UI?
   If the user is subscribed to an annual plan and views the monthly plans tab - I checked that this scenario is not possible because we hide the monthly plans tab for annual plan subscribers and we also don't allow to switch to monthly in the checkout page, so we're good here.

[DavidRothstein]

What should we do when the user switches tabs? So, user subscribed to a monthly plan views the annual plans tab, can we show the pro-rated credits for the annual plans, or is there a concern that this could be a confusing UI?

There was concern about it before, at least (see last bullet point of #49884 (comment)).

[jjchrisdiehl]

I think the easiest way moving forward for now is to keep the tooltip as it is and bring back the crossed-out price. What do you think

And

can we show the pro-rated credits for the annual plans, or is there a concern that this could be a confusing UI?

I advocate that we avoid using the 'crossed out pro-rate' approach from before as it led to a number of support requests from confused customers. While it may make sense to those of us working closely with the plan pricing data, there is a percentage of our customers for whom this visual representation of the pro-rata discount does not click for naturally.

While the current handling of monthly -> annual "bulk buying" is a good experience, it is fundamentally different from a pro-rated rate as applied during an annual plan upgrade.

Instead, I recommend we take a simplified approach for annual pro-rates by notifying the customer that the pro-rated price will be shown during checkout, this has three benefits:

• Less confusing visually
• Less likely to break our pricing table layout (i.e. longer copy breaking across lines)
• Moves the customer into checkout more quickly and closer to the point of conversion

Examples:

Plans page

Checkout

We could also link to pertinent documentation regarding how the pro-rate is calculated.

[claudiucelfilip]

This should be fixed in #60184.
Closing this issue.

[niranjan-uma-shankar]

Reopening this bug since I'm seeing that on legacy plans, the discounted price is not shown. Example below of a site on a Personal plan.