Growing the WB Club subscription from 2.2M to 5.3M members at Wildberries
The problem
WB Club is the paid subscription of Wildberries. The goal was to grow the member base, and with it paywall conversion, trial-to-paid, retention and members’ spending.
When I joined, the Club had a few entry points and one page for everything. My task was to bring it into every product stream and to split that page into two plans, Shopping and VIP, in a design language that fit the app’s renewed core design.
My role
I owned the Club’s design end to end: entry points, plan pages, purchase, onboarding, renewal, cancellation and new services, from seller promos to a charity program and partner offers. Every major change was A/B tested with the analysts.
The Club lives inside other teams’ screens, so most decisions were shared with PMs, researchers, designers and art directors across the company, and with the engineering teams on the edge cases behind eight subscription statuses. The project taught me as much about communication and managing skills as about design.
1. Making the WB Club part
of every stream
The benefits became the entry points: 18 of them across ten streams.
A benefit sells when buyers meet it at the moment it matters. Where the Club changes an offer, such as a price, a delivery or a storage period, the entry point shows what the buyer would get as a member; elsewhere it presents the Club’s main perks. Each opens a bottom sheet with Join, and after joining it shows what the member gains.
The hard part was earning space in screens other teams owned: ten streams, ten sets of priorities to balance.
2. One-click purchase instead of the paywall
Join now subscribes the buyer in one tap, and conversion to subscription rose sharply.
Plans, price, terms and payment method stood between a buyer who had decided and the subscription. After long discussions with product, legal and the stakeholders, we moved to one-click purchase with the saved payment method.
The hard part was the terms: legal needed them visible, so they moved into a short line under the button. A failed payment now moves the subscription to an inactive status while the system retries, instead of losing the member.
3. Give members reasons to stay
Retention ran from the start, alongside growth.
• The new onboarding walks new members through their perks, so they feel the value at once.
• Savings on the WB Club page turn the value into something members can see.
• New benefits and partner offers, announced through notifications, keep giving a reason to come back.
• A delayed benefit unlocks after one to two months, a reason to stay past the first payment. It raised trial-to-paid conversion by 4%.
• Freezing, a new step in the five-step cancellation flow, gives leaving members a pause instead of a goodbye. It raised the save rate by 7%.
4. A new tier for the top buyers
Turning the biggest spenders into members.
VIP is a free tier for the top 1M buyers, built on an unusual mechanic: it costs nothing, but buyers can join only after meeting three spending conditions.
It renews automatically each month as long as members keep meeting them, so staying in becomes a small game they want to keep winning. The challenge was to make the conditions easy to read, so the page shows progress on each one.
The hard part was getting this top segment to join at all. We invited them through notifications and promotion, and switched all 18 Club entry points across the app to offer VIP instead of Shopping to buyers who met the conditions. Within a year, about 37% of the segment joined.
Its stronger benefits also give the ~2M buyers close to qualifying a reason to reach it.
Design library
I built the Club’s components on the core design system, refining each with the core team round after round until it fit and still felt like the WB Club. With illustrators and UI writers, I kept the visuals and tone of voice consistent with the app. One set now covers ten streams, both plans and eight statuses.
Outcome
• The team grew WB Club from 2.2M to 5.3M members in a year.
• ~37% of the top 1M buyers joined VIP in its first year.
• The WB Club went from a few entry points to 18 across ten streams.
• One-click purchase raised conversion to subscription by 31%.
• The delayed benefit raised trial-to-paid conversion by 4%.
• Freezing raised the cancel-flow save rate by 7%.
• First-month retention grew by 16%.
With great gratitude to all the teams, designers, and researchers who made this journey so impactful.