Contextualizing the Shopify Admin
Providing intuitive and powerful tools for merchants to scale their businesses internationally, including through retail and B2B channels.
The Summary
Shopify is a system that offers immense capabilities, but not everything is easily accessible or user-friendly. Our goal was to re-platform Shopify to create a streamlined workspace that serves as the ultimate source of truth and place of work. This project laid the foundation for that vision, resulting in a unified hub for business growth. With Markets and Catalogs, we empower businesses to expand internationally and thrive in both retail and B2B sectors.
⛓️💥 Challenge
The platform was not built to support multi-context configurations. A merchant would have to create new accounts with unique product offerings, that were not linked, to scale there business to any additional context. The enablement of contextualization on the admin scales to almost every surface, the online store front design and content, product offering, shipping and distribution, duties and taxes, currency etc.
🎯 Goal
To build a primitive that supports the concept of drivers and responders, houses them in one admin experience and integrate that structure intuitively with internal and external services.
The process
The foundation of our approach was rooted in a mix of competitive research and insights gathered from merchants frustrations with the current product. We developed an MVP and conducted a design sprint to visualize our concepts. Throughout the process, we maintained a close partnership with engineering, partners, and merchants to ensure that our solutions were both practical and aligned with user needs, ultimately creating a more intuitive and accessible environment that empowers businesses to thrive.
🏃♂️The MVP
Through our competitive analysis and merchant interviews, we discovered that a primary frustration was the need for merchants to set custom pricing for specific audiences. Given that B2B interactions would generate the highest volume, we launched an MVP that allows B2B merchants to customize price lists for their product offerings based on customer location.
Results
100% adoption | Drove 300M in GMV in the first 6 mths | 5% uptick in new B2B merchants
Publishing controls
The next phase was to enable multiple publishing list for merchants in the B2B context. After this, I ran a sprinted to test out a more global control or contextualization across the admin.
Results
It was a hit. We ran with this to refine a system that could unify the entire platform.
The Detail Page Exploration
Sprint Output
Scaling Opportunities
Sprint Output
The Unified Admin
After rounds of testing and internal reviews, we landed on, one surface to hold all the contextualizations (Markets) and a surface to customize specific product offerings.