Subtract the Domain Cost From Plan Purchase When A Domain is Owned

[donalirl]

Steps to Reproduce

1. Register a domain to a free WordPress.com site, without purchasing a plan.
2. Purchase a plan for that site.
3. Observe the cost of the plan is full price, without subtracting the domain cost.

What I expected to happen

Because WordPress.com offers a free domain for one year with every plan purchase, I expected the domain cost to be subtracted from the cost of the plan, and the free domain credit used.

What actually happened

I was charged full price for the plan, and still had a free domain credit.

Context

Came up in #29737791-hc

It used to correctly deduct the domain cost from the plan price when purchasing a plan on a free site with a domain. I am not sure when or why it stopped behaving this way.

Operating System

Windows, macOS

OS Version

No response

Browser

Chrome/Chromium

Browser Version(s)

No response

Is this specific to applied theme? If so, what is the theme name?

No response

Simple/Atomic

No response

Console and/or error logs

No response

Number of Users Impacted

No response

Available Workarounds

They must contact support to add credits (before purchase) or issue a refund of the domain cost (after purchase)

Reproducibility

Consistent

Other information

No response

[synora]

Triaged. Thanks @donalirl for this bug report!

[zdenys]

Another case in 4356256-zd-woothemes User was confused that their pre-owned domain cost was not covered by the free-domain credit they got while upgrading to a paid plan:

Since the domain I own is already assigned to this website, shouldn't the renewal for the domain be extended by a year? Do I need to un-link and re-link it?

[zdenys]

Another case here 4359375-zd-woothemes. User registered the domain, then bought the plan, noticed it comes with free domain credit, so they canceled the domain thinking they could now re-register it for free and had to reach out to sort things out.

[Greatdane]

Not sure if this is more of a feature request?

[github-actions[bot]]

Support References

This comment is automatically generated. Please do not edit it.

• [ ] 4356256-zen
• [ ] 4359375-zen

[donalirl]

16134882-hc

[JessBoctor]

Thanks for highlighting the customer confusion.

This would be a feature request. Whenever a plan is purchased after domain, the user has an option to register a second domain for free (with the credit). The system doesn’t assume they want the credit to be used for the previously purchased domain.

The current workaround is that the customer can contact support to be refunded for their domain purchase and have the domain credit applied to their previously purchased domain.

I have put this on Shilling's project board to look over, but given the current items on the team's to-do list before year-end, it may end up in the backlog.

Please feel free to continue to highlight customers who have struggles with the domain credit not being discounted from the plan so we can track the impact on our users.

[DavidRothstein]

Reinstituting a discount for this scenario has been discussed in many places, I think most recently p58i-ano-p2 (and also p99Zz8-1an-p2 and p99Zz8-1oz-p2 before that). I personally think it's a good idea to add it back, but nothing can really be done here until a decision is made.

This issue may be coming up more often now because I noticed that we recently started allowing people to buy domains without plans during signup again? (For a long time, you could only do that on an existing site, not during signup.) It is not clear to me if that was an intentional decision or not.

[michaeldcain]

From planning:

Cain will discuss with Claire and Dotcom to find out if we should change this now that we're improving the "Free" onboarding flow and domains are being sold to Free users (he'll also check to see if this was intentional).

[michaeldcain]

Left a comment on the most recent post (p58i-ano-p2#comment-56696) asking for confirmation. It looks like there was a decision at the time to fix it for free→domain→plan users, but the change was never made.

[michaeldcain]

From the comment on that thread, we're going to put this in the backlog and reevaluate after the free plan flow launches.

[michaeldcain]

From planning:

There is some code in Bundle_Upsell that tries to handle this with a random discount amount. It's also technically possible to upgrade from an add-on (product) to plan and receive a discount. Adding this logic there allows the discount to be seen outside of just shopping-cart contexts. In implementing, we'll want to consider whether or not there's some possibility for abuse when purchasing/cancelling plans and domains separately.

As far as impact for prioritization - let's ask a Happiness PA to add a tag to get some metrics on frequency for this issue. @JessBoctor offered to get this started. After that, let's return it to the inbox.

[DavidRothstein]

One other note from planning (via Jess) was to think about how this is affected by sales and discounts on domains. In general, Bundle_Upsell works by giving a discount based on the value of the thing you're trading in (not what you paid for it) which is good, but we need to check for the various kinds of discounts that are used on domains.

[JessBoctor]

Highlighted in #dotcom-product-ambassadors here: p1679423893584349-slack-dotcom-product-ambassadors

[JessBoctor]

A request for metrics on how often this is an issue was submitted to HappOps by @retnonindya. See peCdcN-12-p2

I let Retno know there isn't any rush on getting metrics, but that not having the information is a blocker to Shilling's decison about whether to move forward on this issue or not.

[JessBoctor]

Update on the impact on users:

From @gracie at peCdcN-12#comment-9-P2-happopsrequests

It looks like 29% of people who purchase a domain then upgrade to a plan of some sort. That looks like 2,300 people per week who are impacted by this.

For digging, I have a spreadsheet with chats and tickets from the past 5 weeks with the setup you requested (refunds and domains):

d/1N93Xxd76_SKqWp6EMR9fSoosOvSTHM8U5-d8sGm2Sig-Google-Spreadsheets

There are more than enough chats there, so you don’t have to go through all of them. For tickets, the number is small because categorization hasn’t been required on tickets lately, so there isn’t a way to gauge impact on support.

Tracks funnel is here (there is also a link in Gracie's P2 Comment): 40724-tracks-Mar0623-Mar1223

Moving back into Shilling Inbox for further priority discussion given this new insight.

[DavidRothstein]

Wondering if those numbers have been artificially high recently and will be affected by p7DVsv-h8q-p2 ?

[michaeldcain]

From planning:

Let's leave this in the inbox to see the effect of the Signup flow change above.

[JessBoctor]

I asked HappOpps for some indication of the impact of the Signup flow change: peCdcN-12-p2#comment-151

[JessBoctor]

It seems the best way to confirm if domains without a plan purchases are resulting in plan purchases/refunds later is with an SQL query. Seems tacks isn't able to look this up.

[JessBoctor]

Considering the Google Domains Pivot, the historical impact might not be important anymore as we will want to make it as easy as possible for customers that we acquire through transferring Google Domains to then upgrade/add a plan.

Context: p58i-eQR-p2-dotcom

[sirbrillig]

This is actually complicated by the Google Domains project because those domain transfers are free for the first year. Therefore, if a user purchased a plan after importing a domain and were able to assign the domain credit to the imported domain afterward, they would receive another free year. I'm pretty sure this is not desirable behavior from a business standpoint.

We're going to continue to track this issue to see its impact. If we decide to change the current behavior we will need to make an internal p2 post (as opposed to this public issue) to discuss the change with the relevant parties and determine the best way forward.

[sirbrillig]

From planning: We can't easily tell how frequent this request might be, and implementing it is quite complicated, so we're going to move this to the backlog for now.

[DavidRothstein]

This is actually complicated by the Google Domains project because those domain transfers are free for the first year. Therefore, if a user purchased a plan after importing a domain and were able to assign the domain credit to the imported domain afterward, they would receive another free year. I'm pretty sure this is not desirable behavior from a business standpoint.

It actually seems OK to me. We're offering two separate promotions, one for Google Domains users and one for users who buy a plan, and some users are eligible for both. But I created an internal issue for it now: https://github.com/Automattic/payments-shilling/issues/2054