[ CASE STUDY ]
Unvinpezi.ro
E-commerce · Long-term UX ownership · 15+ years (live)
How taking price information away lifted conversion — and what fifteen years on one product teaches you.
Context
Unvinpezi.ro is a curated online wine shop with a premium membership model — a daily-selected wine at a sharp price, expert reviews, and member benefits. I’ve worked with it for more than fifteen years, through three major business-model shifts and many redesigns, owning the usability of the product end to end: concept, testing, live measurement, iteration.
This is what long-term product ownership actually looks like — UX evolving in step with the business, not a periodic visual refresh.
My role
I led the full usability process: early concept and design proposals, heuristic evaluations, usability testing on the live product, feedback analysis, and the iterative design responses that followed. Because the engagement spanned years and several business pivots, the job was less “fix this screen” and more “keep the product coherent as the business kept changing underneath it.”
The problem: four prices, one confused buyer
One pricing problem from that history is a perfect small illustration of a large principle.
Each wine carried two price points — a regular price and a premium-member price — plus a discount, which added up to four price variants competing on screen at once. A marketing decision put all four into the product listing. The intent was transparency. The effect was the opposite: clutter, confusion, and a browsing experience that broke. Overwhelmed by competing numbers, users fixed on the lowest one, ignored the conditions and the membership context entirely, and conversion dropped sharply.
The classic trap: more information is not better information when the context is missing.
The thinking: three hypotheses, tested
I didn’t redesign on instinct. I structured the fix as controlled variants, each with a hypothesis we could actually test:
Version A — Simplify. Show only the regular price in listings; reveal the member’s personalised price in context, on hover or in the basket. One number on the shelf, the personal one where it matters.
Version B — Compact dual. Keep both prices visible, but compress them to roughly a third of their original footprint. The bet: maybe both numbers can stay if the noise comes down.
Version C — Optimised hybrid (where we landed). One primary price, a quiet label signalling the member benefit (“−10% for members”), and an info interaction revealing the actual member price for anyone who wants it. Clarity on the shelf; the personalised value a tap away.
What it proved
The hybrid won: conversion rose 44.4%.
The lessons generalise well beyond wine:
Cognitive overload costs conversion — competing numbers mislead when they aren’t contextualised.
Progressive disclosure works — lead with the universal (the regular price), reveal the conditional (the member price) on demand.
Intent sets the hierarchy — people browse to compare wines, not to evaluate membership terms, so the interface should respect that order.
Where it sits
Fifteen years on one product, across three business models, is its own kind of evidence — not a single clever intervention, but the discipline of keeping a product clear and converting while the business underneath it keeps moving. The same instinct, protecting the buyer’s clarity exactly where pricing and membership tiers get complicated, is what premium and subscription commerce runs on.