The pricing tier gap merchants never ask about
Hey,
A merchant doesn’t read a pricing page top to bottom.
They read the free column first, then drag their eyes across to the paid column and go down it line by line, checking what they’d actually be paying for that they don’t already get for free.
Founders don’t read their own page that way. On most pricing audits I run, each tier holds up fine on its own. Free column, clean. Paid column, clean.
Read them side by side, though, and one specific gap keeps showing up. A feature sitting in the paid tier with nothing across from it in free. Analytics on the paid side, no mention of it under free at all.
A merchant looking at that doesn’t wonder where the free version of it went. They assume it was never there, because from where they’re reading, it never was.
One line like that reads as a normal plan boundary. A handful of them, and the merchant starts wondering what else on the page is dressed up bigger than it actually is.
The fix isn’t complicated once you see it.
- Free tier lists exactly what’s free, nothing more.
- Paid tier opens with “everything in free, plus” and only adds what’s new from there.
- Nothing gets repeated under a bigger-sounding name to pad out the paid column.
If “basic reports” in free becomes “advanced analytics” in paid, and it’s the same report with one added filter, that’s the same trick as the missing line, just running in the other direction.
To catch it on your own page, read it in the order a merchant actually reads it, not the order you built it in:
- Free column top to bottom, then paid column top to bottom.
- Go back down the paid column and ask, for each line, whether there’s a free line it maps to.
- Anything with no match gets one of two fixes: move it into free if it belongs there, or leave it paid-only and say so plainly instead of dressing it up.
Some limits are real, and that’s fine to state. Say a free plan is capped at 3 stores, a paid plan has no cap. Write that as a number on both lines: “3 stores” on the free side, “unlimited stores” on the paid side. Not “get started with a few stores” against “scale without limits.”
Same rule every time. Whatever you write on one side of the comparison, a merchant is going to hold it up against the other side before they decide anything. Might as well make sure it survives that.
If you want another set of eyes on how your tiers actually hold up next to each other, book a free Shopify app audit.
Ohad
