Universal Onboarding for Shopify Products

Background

After successfully refining the Shopify Payments onboarding experience and achieving positive results, we sought to extend this streamlined process to other Shopify products requiring KYC verification. The key challenge was:
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How can we design a unified, efficient system that allows merchants to submit their KYC information once, eliminating the need to re-submit for each product?
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The project aimed to ensure that merchants could seamlessly access multiple Shopify products without redundant tasks, lowering the barrier to entry and reducing the risk of verification failures.

Challenges

• Diverse verification requirements: Each product relied on different assessors for KYC verification, often with varying requirements that introduced complexity.
• Evolving business details: Merchants’ business structures, ownership, or team information may have changed between onboarding for different products, necessitating updates.
• Collaborating across teams: Ensuring alignment between multiple teams (e.g., Capital, Payments, Balance) was essential for seamless product adoption and consistent user experiences.
• Product specific needs: Certain products required additional steps, such as accepting unique terms or submitting supplementary documentation.

My role

As the Designer leading this project, my responsibilities included:

• Simplifying complexities: Addressing product differences and creating a unified, intuitive onboarding experience for merchants.
• Collaborating across teams: Partnering with cross-functional teams (Capital, Payments, Balance, etc.) to ensure seamless alignment and implementation.
• Designing for scalability: Developing scalable flows and interfaces that enabled merchants to onboard additional products with minimal effort.
• Mentoring and presenting: Delivering presentations and mentoring across disciplines to share design insights, address questions, and promote onboarding best practices.

Impact

This project simplified access to multiple Shopify products for merchants, reducing effort and friction. By delivering a streamlined onboarding experience, we empowered merchants to focus on growing their businesses. Additionally, other teams no longer needed to worry about designing or managing their own onboarding flows. All aspects, including edge cases, were already addressed, significantly shortening the time to market for new products.

The solution