Tokopedia PLUS

After ByteDance's acquisition and the full integration of Tokopedia and TikTok Shop, the two platforms were kept strategically distinct. TikTok Shop serves impulse buyers driven by content. Tokopedia serves customers who come to shop. That difference mattered for how each platform needed to grow.

Tokopedia's GMV growth had stalled. Market research showed that 18% of monthly active customers were generating 50% of total GMV, a highly engaged, high-LTV segment the platform was underserving. The existing PLUS membership program had grown thin: free shipping and application fee waivers that were competitive at launch, but eroded by the benefit depth of Chinese e-commerce players running stacked discount calendars on every double-date holiday.

I was given the mandate to own the design direction for PLUS end-to-end. At the time I led six designers, three on Tokopedia and three on TikTok Shop Creator & Affiliate. I partnered with roughly half of Tokopedia’s PMs, since I owned design for half of Tokopedia’s business units. The goal was to retain high-value users, convert potential ones, and make the membership worth what customers were now being asked to pay for it, because the subscription price was going up.

PLUS hadn’t been a priority for months. I’d been supervising it since Q3 2024 alongside the originally assigned designer. In Q1 2025 I made a deliberate people call. I moved that designer to another domain for better distribution across the team, and put a different designer on PLUS, specifically because PLUS was moving into the spotlight and I wanted to use it to unlock her potential and prepare her for more responsibility as part of her promotion plan. She had a quarter to grasp a complex domain, and she wasn’t full-time on it. PLUS was about 50% of her capacity at first. When the project got prioritized in Q2 2025 and the plan solidified, she moved to 100% focus.

For a program that touched the entire funnel, the design team was small: me and that one designer. Most of the work ran on influence rather than headcount. We partnered with every designer and PM whose surface we touched, homepage through order history, in a lot of back-and-forth to land decisions across teams we didn’t own. It wasn’t smooth like butter, but the challenge was the best part of it. We were learning PLUS inside out while improving the design at the same time.

On top of that, engineering couldn't absorb the full proposed solution in one go. The campaign and deployment deadlines were fixed. My role was to hold the target experience as the reference point while helping the team find a delivery path that was actually executable.

To make a balanced decision, prioritizing the phasing around purchase intent was the right choice. Front-funnel surfaces shipped first: homepage, product card, PDP, cart, and checkout, the surfaces where conversion decisions happen and where benefit visibility has the most direct impact on GMV. Order history and order detail pages moved to phase two, lower penetration, lower urgency. The target was to have the complete solution running by 2026, building month by month rather than compromising the core experience to hit an artificial completeness.

I also set a component library mandate early. Every design decision had to build from existing library components first, new variants before new components, custom components only with justification. In practice, more than 80% of PLUS shipped on existing components, extended with new variants, tweaks, and component upgrades. The handful of net-new components were genuinely unavoidable: landing-page-only elements, or cases where no existing component fit the need. PLUS wasn’t a one-time launch. The foundations needed to hold without accumulating debt the team would service across future iterations.

Almost nothing here was invented from scratch. The coupon and label components, the design system, the institutional knowledge of how customers behave across the funnel, all of it was built over years of prior work on Tokopedia. Past decisions compound. What we shipped here became another layer in that foundation.

My main job on PLUS was the holistic view: designing the right thing so PLUS became the way customers wanted to shop and stick with the platform. Most of what follows is direction I set and then worked through with my designer, surface by surface. I also stayed hands-on where it counted, the landing-page structure and the PLUS gold label were both mine, start to finish. The calls below are the ones I drove.

The first call was visual identity. PLUS needed to feel premium enough to justify both the price increase and the benefit upgrade. We explored widely before committing, with variations across ruby, emerald, and other gem tones, plus open questions on the logo and icon and even the feature name: keep “PLUS” or rename it. We took the options into user testing, run through a research vendor via the marketing team. Jade green won for two reasons. It still inherits Tokopedia’s base green, so PLUS reads as a premium tier rather than a different brand, and the gold paired with it tested as sophisticated and prestigious without making users uncomfortable. The intent was that customers should feel the difference between a PLUS and a non-PLUS experience before they read a single line of copy.

The second call was where we placed benefit communication. The existing approach concentrated everything on the landing page, effective for customers who already knew about PLUS, useless for everyone else. I expanded the benefit expression across the full purchase journey so PLUS was ambient in the shopping experience, not a destination you had to seek out. For subscribers, constant reinforcement of value. For non-subscribers, organic discovery at the moment they were most likely to consider. Placement took testing, not just instinct. On the PDP, we first tried a bigger jade-green block in the free-shipping area to raise PLUS presence, and the A/B test showed it didn’t move anything. So we moved PLUS closer to the price and sat the applied coupon right next to it. Proximity to the price did what the bigger block couldn’t.

The third was a structural benefit shift. Free shipping had been the legacy hook. It was familiar but no longer differentiated. Moving the primary anchor to an always-on stackable discount gave us something directly legible at the point of purchase. Customers could see the actual price they would pay with PLUS applied, not an abstract shipping waiver. Every price-bearing surface in the journey had to make that math visible and immediate.

I’ll be honest: I doubted the pricing strategy at first. Enrollment was subscription-fee-only, and the increase was roughly 10x, too optimistic for the Indonesian market, even though the benefits genuinely outweighed the cost if you maximized them. The business team was firm. This was the China-proven model they wanted to test here.

Rather than relitigate the price, I pushed the harder design problem: how do people enroll at all if the upfront fee is a wall? That reframing helped open a second path, a free trial and a mission mechanic that unlocked PLUS by hitting a monthly spend threshold. That turned out to balance GMV attribution against ROI far better than subscription-only would have, and it became central to the program’s economics.

After the initial rollout, early free trial seeding had grown the subscriber base but concentrated low-value users within it. Left unaddressed, that population would depress ROI and make the program economics unsustainable. I worked with the PLUS PMs to shift the trial strategy from broad acquisition toward targeting users more likely to generate long-term value. The design work here was about sequencing: which surfaces carried acquisition messaging, which carried retention reinforcement, and which moments celebrated savings to build habitual return.