Streamline the experience building marketplace solutions on platforms with Shopify
Client
Shopify
Industry
eCommerce
Services
Product Design Design System
Product Area
Payments
My Role
Product Designer
Timeline
February 2021 - March 2022
Context
The project aimed to design the most seamless experience for Partners (developer community) to build their unique marketplace on their platform with Shopify. This will empower merchants to start, run, and grow their businesses by reducing the barriers to reaching buyers anywhere.
Problems
Shopify merchants depend on limited channels to reach their buyers. Ads have become more expensive and less effective, and it has become more challenging with Apple changing the rules around data tracking and user privacy on iPhones.
Currently, there are 2 million+ Shopify merchants, and the number keeps growing. Merchants need more sales channels to reach potential buyers.
Shopify's existing partners (Spotify, Pinterest, Google, Facebook) took around 1-2 years to build the commerce solutions with complete reliance on the partnership team's support.
Goals
Accelerate the building process of multi-merchant commerce with full Marketplace APIs, prebuilt components, and best practices. As the result, merchants have more options to reach buyers and increase the number of purchases.
Reduce business expenses for partnership support with self-guided documentation and best practices.
Increase the merchants’ satisfaction level and the number of new merchants, which brings more revenue to Shopify.
Role
End-to-end development flow. I worked collaboratively with developers, a technical writer, and a content designer.
The best practices of buyer experiences on partners' platforms. Aligned with developers of the current limitations.
Polaris for channel. I worked with a Staff Product Designer to design the prebuilt components for partners building a channel app to connect with Shopify merchants.
The information architecture of the microsite as the marketing entry point. I worked closely with a marketing designer and content designer.
Design
Data and research We did card sorting exercises with existing and potential partners to understand better the development flow and commerce solutions they would expect to build on their platforms. We had 6 participants in a developer role from different sizes of tech companies, such as Local Puppy, Snappy, Wish, Newegg, Lyst, and Spotify.
From the card sorting exercise, I analyzed that partners have a similar pattern in the development process following the flow of “Before - During - After.”
After the card sorting exercises, I did a follow-up interview to know the challenges partners faced in the development process. Here are the key insights.
I paired with developers to understand the step-by-step development process partners need to go through to build the multi-merchant commerce (marketplace).
Discover early ideation Our partnership team has been working closely for years, supporting partners like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and Spotify, giving insights into what commerce solutions our partners would like to build with Shopify.
I collected the features existing partners have successfully built with Shopify integrations from merchant-facing channel apps and buyer-facing platforms.
Define the marketplace use cases I worked collaboratively with a Product Manager and Engineers in our team to define the possible buyer experiences and limitations of multi-merchant solutions, which we presented to the stakeholders.
I did the feature analysis to cover the prioritization of possible buyer experiences partners could build using the Shopify Marketplace APIs.
I defined the user flow of the marketplace experiences on the partners' platforms based on their resources and investment levels.
Design the marketplace use cases Then, I started the wireframing process by quickly sketching to discuss the technical feasibility with the team.
I prototyped the best practices into three different use cases for building multi-merchant commerce based on partners’ resources and investment levels.
Low-cost approach Simple multi-merchants organic listings or ads display redirecting buyers to the product detail page of the merchant's store.
Non-traditional marketplace Embedding multi-merchants commerce solutions to partners' existing services. (e.g., selling artists' merchandise on top of Spotify music streaming).
Traditional marketplace Solutions for partners who want to invest in building a commerce-first platform.
Design the microsite and dev docs I worked closely with a content designer on the sitemap, wireframes, information architecture of the microsite, and user flow to the end-to-end development docs.
Microsite I designed the microsite as the marketing entry point for potential partners to discover the "Marketplace Kit" to answer “Why” merchants need to build marketplace platforms with Shopify and redirect them to the end-to-end development docs on Shopify.dev.
Shopify.dev I worked closely with a Product Manager, Engineers, and Tech Writers to design the end-to-end development flow of building multi-merchant commerce (marketplace).
User testing I did the user testing with third-party developers to validate the new structure of dev docs and the use cases to build a marketplace on partners’ platforms.
Polaris for Channel - merchant experience I designed prebuilt components for partners building a channel app to allow Shopify merchants to use their channel services.
Outcomes
Increased 80% of development speed for partners embedding commerce to their platform with Shopify.
Reduced 50% of company expenses for partnership support by designing the self-guided documentation.
Represented a 20% quarter-on-quarter increase in merchants’ sales revenue by onboarding more sales channels for Shopify merchants.
Future plan
With the new multi-merchant marketplace checkout SDK, allow partners to build the unified checkout of multiple products from multi-merchants.
Extend the marketplace seller fees and payouts and provide tax breakdown for multi-merchant products.
Allow partners to easily embed commerce in their existing properties to fetch products from each merchant’s shop individually and keep all this information synced with new multi-merchant product listing, discovery, and search APIs.
More to explore
CX - Localization
Guiding merchants to increase the tax compliance rate in Japan
