Shopify.
Rebuilding onboarding for Shopify's move from online into in-person commerce.
Role
Design lead, player/coach
Responsible for
Strategy, Quality, Craft
Team
Retail Start
Scope
2M users
Overview
Context
Shopify was moving from online-only commerce to omnichannel. Merchants had to complete two separate onboardings (online store, then Point of Sale), stretching setup to four weeks and burning most of the 14-day Pro trial in the process.
Goals: shorten time to first sale, capture both tiers in the success metric, stop wasting the Pro trial.
Strategy
Three shifts in parallel. Restructure teams around the customer journey, redefine the north star metric, and replace the two onboardings with a single adaptive flow built on progressive disclosure. The throughline: design around where the merchant is, not how the company is organized.
Impact
ARR doubled in one year: $51M to $100M
Pro customers: 14k to 36k (+157%)
Basic customers: 22k to 28k (+27%)
Time to fully onboarded: 4 weeks to 2 weeks
Unified onboarding
Merge two onboardings into a single adaptive flow.
Self-served unified onboarding with personalization and progressive disclosure.
Pro trial
Stop wasting the trial. Make it visible, valuable, and well-timed.
A visible, persistent Pro trial, uncoupled from ecomm onboarding.
Hardware to online
Bridge the gap between physical hardware setup and the online product.
Hardware setup, troubleshooting, and test transactions, all in-product.
