Unified Pricing System

Overview

Pricing at Laced was fragmented. Fees, shipping adjustments, and marketplace margins were surfaced inconsistently — buyers would see one price on a product page and a different total at checkout. For high-value sneaker purchases, that kind of surprise doesn't just lose the sale; it damages trust in the whole platform. I redesigned the pricing model to present a single, consistent price across every surface.

The problem

The symptoms were clear: conversion drops between PDP and cart, conversion drops again between cart and checkout, and support tickets about "why did the price change?" were a steady background noise. Funnel data showed the mismatch was hitting hardest on high-consideration purchases — exactly where trust matters most.

The root cause wasn't a bad pricing strategy. It was duplicated pricing logic spread across PDP, cart, and checkout that produced different outputs depending on where it was calculated. Engineering had built each surface somewhat independently, and the inconsistency had compounded over time.

There was also an internal conflict to navigate. The lead backend engineer felt the architecture changes were risky and that simplifying the logic too aggressively would break edge cases across markets. He was right to flag it. I stepped back, mapped every dependency and failure mode with data — support volumes tied to pricing confusion, funnel drop-off, revenue lost from abandoned baskets — and proposed splitting the work into two phases.

What I did

Phase 1 addressed the presentation layer with low engineering risk and immediate UX impact: getting the same final price to display consistently across PDP, cart, and checkout. Phase 2 refactored the underlying calculation service once we had clearer instrumentation and had proven the approach worked.

I worked across Finance, Legal, Engineering, and Ops to ensure the pricing model was accurate and compliant. I ran sensitivity analyses to model different fee configurations, iterated on copy and transparency UX based on user testing, and ensured engineering had unambiguous logic — no hidden conditionals or environment-specific overrides.

Systems I built

• Pricing architecture map: documented the complete set of inputs and outputs (base price, seller fees, marketplace margin, shipping, tax/duties, discounts, rounding rules) to expose where duplication and drift were occurring
• Consistent price rendering: rebuilt PDP, cart, and checkout to call the same pricing source, eliminating surface-level discrepancies
• Phased calculation service refactor: cleaned the underlying logic after instrumentation gave us confidence in the output, enabling safer iteration on pricing without touching unrelated systems
• Finance and compliance alignment: partnered with Finance to validate fee configurations; worked with Legal to ensure transparency disclosures met requirements across markets
• Monitoring setup: dashboards tracking pricing-related CS complaint volume and basket abandonment rates to validate impact and catch regressions

Impact

The unified pricing model added approximately £170k per month in incremental revenue. Pricing-related CS complaints reduced. Marketplace liquidity improved as buyer confidence in checkout totals increased — buyers who trust what they're paying are more likely to complete high-value purchases.