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Shopify.

Rebuilding onboarding for Shopify's move from online into in-person commerce.

Shopify's marketing site headlined "The platform commerce is built on," with store and order-summary cards.
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.

  • Shopify marketing page — "The platform commerce is built on" — with product and order cards.
  • Point of Sale setup guide in the Shopify admin: a checklist of tasks to get ready to sell in person.
  • The adaptive setup flow shown as stacked Step 1–3 cards.
  • Unified setup guide card with completed and remaining onboarding tasks.
  • Point of Sale setup tasks on mobile.

Self-served, unified onboarding with personalization and progressive disclosure.

Pro trial

Stop wasting the trial. Make it visible, valuable, and well-timed.

  • POS setup guide with a persistent "Make more sales with POS Pro" trial callout.
  • "Start your POS Pro free trial" modal over the admin.

A visible, persistent Pro trial, unscoped from ecomm onboarding.

Hardware to online

Bridge the gap between physical hardware setup and the online product.

  • Shopify POS hardware — a tablet on a stand with a card reader — set up on a retail counter.
  • In-product hardware setup linking out to the Shopify hardware store's card readers.
  • POS app test-transaction flow: enabling test mode to run a practice checkout.

Hardware setup, troubleshooting, and test transactions, all in-product.

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