A Phone Plan Store That Shows You What You’d Save Before You Click Anything
By Scott Steinmetz ·
Most people pay too much for their phone plan, and most of them know it. They just do not want to deal with it. Comparing plans feels like homework, and every carrier's website is built to confuse you into the most expensive option.
I started reselling phone service that runs on the same three major networks most people already use, for noticeably less. The service was good. The website selling it was not. It was running a stock template that showed a generic blog feed as its front page. A visitor had no idea what was for sale, what it cost, or why they should care.
Store-builder templates I tried had the same weakness. They are great at listing products. They are not built to answer the one question a phone shopper has: "How much would I actually save?" So I rebuilt the storefront around that question.
How the System Works
- The Savings Slider: Right at the top of the page, visitors drag a slider to their current monthly bill, and the page instantly shows what they would pay instead and how much they would keep each year.
- Prices That Never Go Stale: Every price on the page is pulled straight from the store's actual product list. Change a price in one place, and the homepage, the calculator, and the checkout all update together.
- Three Networks, One Look: The design uses three colored dots, one for each network the service runs on, as a simple visual promise that you keep the coverage you already know.
- Checkout Stays Simple: The page design never touches the checkout itself, so buying a plan uses the store's well-tested payment flow.
Overcoming the Friction
1. Prices Showing Up as Gibberish
My first attempt at live pricing showed visitors raw bracketed code where the dollar amounts should have been. The homepage layout was built in a way that skipped the step that turns those placeholders into real numbers. I moved the pricing into a different kind of page section that does run that step, and the real prices appeared.
2. Visitors Seeing Yesterday's Design
To keep the site fast, a security and speed service stores copies of the site's images and styling around the country for a very long time. That is great for speed, but it meant visitors kept seeing the old design after I published the new one. I set up a way to clear just the changed files from those stored copies after every update, so a change goes live for everyone right away without slowing down the rest of the site.
3. A Growing Catalog Outgrew the Nightly Security Scan
When the phone and accessory catalog grew to nearly 7,800 files almost overnight, my nightly virus scan of the server started running out of time. Worse, it was quietly taking the checks scheduled after it down with it. The catalog was not the problem. The scan schedule was. I first gave the virus scan its own time limit so the other checks always run. Then, when it still could not finish, I changed it to scan any new or changed files every night plus one-seventh of everything else, so every file gets checked at least once a week.
The Business Win
- The Answer Comes First: Visitors see their own potential savings within seconds of landing, before they read a single plan description.
- One Place to Change Prices: Updating a plan price is a single edit. There is no hunting through pages for old numbers.
- Room for a Bigger Catalog: The store now carries a full lineup of phones and accessories alongside the plans, and the server keeps up.
The next step is adding a family-plan version of the savings slider, since households with four or five lines are where the yearly savings get dramatic.
Curious what this looks like for something you need built? See more of these side by side on the case studies page.