An 18% decline in new stores, reversed in 8 months, during Printify’s busiest season.
Role
Sole product designer
Team
PM, 6 developers, Head of Product
Company
Printify · E-commerce, B2B2C
Timeline
7 months, 2025 ·
Success screen: “Congratulations on setting up your store”
+9%
New stores created three months after launch, reversing a six-month 18% decline.
91%
Of active merchants completed the new verification process.
0.4%
Of Support inquiries were about the redesign.
I also gave the team ownership of the Pop-Up store journey, so it could iterate and run experiments on its own.
Merchants weren’t reaching the value of Pop-Up stores
New store creation had fallen 18% in six months. Most merchants created a store, then sold through other channels. The PM and I read analytics, surveys, support tickets and session recordings to find where the journey broke.
Didn’t understand Pop-Up’s value or how it worked
33%
Couldn’t find how to publish products
24%
Finished onboarding without creating a product
16%
Hit technical issues
11%
These weren’t isolated usability issues. The flow was fragmented and distracting.
Defining what a successful merchant looks like
No one had defined what successful merchants do, so I mapped the actions on the platform and looked for the ones that correlated with sales.
Number of product published by successful merchants.
5+
Verified within 24 hours
Uploaded a logo
Published 5+ products
We had no ownership over our core journey
Digging into session recordings, I found that a rogue modal owned by the onboarding team was redirecting merchants before they could finish setting up their store.
Nobody had told us it launched, and I was the first to spot it.
I proposed a small Success step at the end of store creation to celebrate the milestone.
It was small enough to get buy-in, and it gave us a screen inside the onboarding team’s flow that we could change and run experiments on ourselves.
It contributed to +9% new stores, reversing the six-month decline.
The team could now run experiments and fix bugs on the core journey on its own.
Around the same time, Printify was going through a full rebrand
Product teams had started adopting jobs-to-be-done thinking. Alongside other designers, I explored how these principles could be used.
I added a simplified product step to store creation, so new stores launch with a product already published instead of an empty shelf.
24% of merchants couldn’t find how to publish products.
I designed the flow to guide merchants through each job, from creating a store to publishing their first product and celebrating that milestone.
That pattern became the guided flow, adapted for every sales channel.
With the guided flow working, the next problem came with a deadline.
Your store will be disabled in 90 days
Compliance requirements forced Printify to switch payment providers.
That meant every merchant had to verify their identity and manage their own taxes.
Peak season was close and the biggest risk was that Stripe could flag legitimate merchants with no recourse, putting their businesses at risk overnight.
I split the experience by audience: active merchants needed urgency because of the deadline; new merchants needed a calm explanation of the process ahead.
Merchants had 90 days to migrate or be forced to stop selling.
We couldn’t fully control the experience, verification opened in a new window not inline but I was able to apply our brand typography and colors to make it feel native.
We used Stripe’s pre-built components to ship quickly.
Merchants never asked for this change, so I took responsibility to make the transition as seamless as possible.
Nudging merchants to act
I proposed a proactive communication strategy with persistent banners and modals guiding merchants to verification.
Active merchants saw a deadline; new merchants saw a calm walkthrough.
Messaging adapted based how many products they had published: more products meant more encouraging messaging.
Merchants who started but didn’t finish got reminders, and time-triggered modals appeared one month and one week before the deadline.
Only one banner was visible at a time, even if more criteria applied.
I ran workshops with engineers to map the logic, structure, and edge cases before pitching it to other teams.
The PM and I got other teams to agree to our team owning banner behavior inside their codebase. That gave us direct control over banner fixes instead of waiting on another team.
The banners had to work across every platform surface and different merchant statuses.
I also established an ongoing process with Support and Marketing for help articles and email campaigns.
Disabled stores destroy trust
When a store was disabled, a warning banner appeared at the top. For visitors, that made the store look untrustworthy.
I noticed that if merchants saw traffic to their disabled store, they’d have a reason to complete verification.
A disabled store should not be a dead end.
I replaced the warning with an email signup field and a dashboard widget showing visits and emails collected.
The first release showed what broke
We shipped to 5% of merchants behind feature flags and reviewed Fullstory sessions weekly.
The banners had to work across every platform surface and different merchant statuses.
The rollout exposed bugs in the banners, the call to action and the Stripe flow. Fullstory didn’t record inside Stripe, which left the key step invisible.
Of merchants who published a product, started verification
79%
Completed within 48 hours
63%
Abandoned on the first try
32%
After fixes: active merchants completed verification
91%
Reflections
A small step can matter most
The Success step reduced fragmentation and gave merchants a sense of completion.
Good messaging can land better than expected
I knew active merchants wanted to keep selling, but 91% in the first two months beat my expectations.
Ownership was the biggest constraint
When a flow lives across teams, even minor changes become slow and coordination-heavy.
Arrive with a plan
Workshops with engineers and close PM work let us pitch to other teams with confidence.
Next time I would push to set clear ownership of end-to-end journeys up front, so teams can iterate quickly and answer for the results.