The Problem

The Challenge:
Merchants faced a cumbersome onboarding experience for Shopify Payments due to a lengthy, single-page form that created a heavy cognitive load. This led to frequent errors in submitted information, resulting in failed verifications and disrupted merchant operations (e.g., delayed payouts or paused transactions).

‍Business Context:
As Shopify continues its global expansion, onboarding processes must meet diverse regional KYC requirements while ensuring a scalable and intuitive experience. The previous system struggled to accommodate varying business needs and compliance constraints, creating barriers for merchants and negatively impacting completion rates.

Goals and Objectives

The Process

To tackle merchant frustrations, the team focused on two key principles:
- Ease of Use: Simplify the onboarding process to minimize errors and reduce drop-offs.
- Healthy Friction: Add deliberate checkpoints to encourage merchants to carefully review sensitive information before submission.

Key strategies included:
- Segmenting the form into smaller, manageable steps with integrated review screens at critical points.
- Implementing dynamic logic to display only the fields relevant to the merchant's business type and location.
- Enabling merchants to upload ID and business documents seamlessly, increasing the likelihood of successful verification.

Low-fidelity wireframes explored the balance between speed and accuracy, introducing a Review & Confirm Step for merchants to verify details before submission. The initial approach used a single-page flow that opened one step at a time, progressing sequentially. While this worked in some cases, it proved cumbersome for merchants needing to revisit previous steps to edit information. The more promising exploration broke the flow into separate pages, where each step was clearly defined and easier to navigate, offering greater flexibility and reducing cognitive load.

The final solution

1. The onboarding flow

The final solution implemented a step-by-step flow, where business details were divided across separate pages to simplify the process and reduce cognitive load. The flow starts with a preflight step, clearly explaining how data will be used and ensuring merchants are reassured about secure storage. Merchants then select their business type, tailoring the subsequent steps to their specific needs. After completing the required details, a dedicated Review & Confirm Step allows merchants to review all inputs and upload necessary identification or business documents, increasing the likelihood of successful verification. This approach achieves a balance between usability and compliance, delivering a seamless onboarding experience

2. Adding owners, executives, or directors

The process of adding individuals was simplified by offering clear role definitions and providing additional insights for the Owner step, such as displaying remaining equity. To handle the complexity of individuals occupying multiple roles (e.g., Owner and Director), the flow was dynamically designed to adapt, enabling seamless input and efficient management of combined roles

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3. Document Upload for Identity and Business Verification

To improve the likelihood of successful verification, an optional document upload section was introduced. Merchants receive clear guidance on the types of documents accepted in their jurisdiction and the specific requirements for each submission.

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4. Creation of new components for the design system

I designed new components specifically tailored to support the step-by-step onboarding flow. Collaborating closely with the engineering team, I ensured seamless integration by delivering comprehensive documentation and a detailed breakdown of each component. These components were eventually adopted company-wide and extended to other products.

The outcomes

- Decreased onboarding drop-off rates: Reduced drop-offs by approximately 18%, improving merchant engagement and process completion rates.
- Reduced verification failures: Enhanced form accuracy resulted in a noticeable reduction in failed verifications.
- Lowered support queries: Merchant support requests decreased by around 20%, thanks to self-serve resources and a streamlined remediation flow addressing common issues.
- Enhanced scalability: The improved system architecture facilitated quicker implementation in new countries, reducing time-to-market and supporting global expansion.
- Company-wide adoption: The efficient onboarding flow was adopted by multiple teams, standardizing and enhancing onboarding experiences across the organization.