01
Result
Turning an 18% decline into 9% growth, during a business-model change
Role
Sole product designer
Team
PM, 6 developers, Head of Product
Company
Printify · E-commerce, B2B2C
Timeline
7 months, 2025 ·
+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 all support inquiries were about the Pop-Up store changes.
Context
Pop-Up Store is an e-commerce product inside Printify’s print-on-demand platform. Its merchants are small businesses and creators who chose it because it’s simple. A forced business-model change put that simplicity at risk, and keeping it became the design challenge.
I also got my team ownership of the Pop-Up journey, so we could fix bugs and run experiments without asking another team.
02
Problem
-18%
New store creation had declined in six months.
Most merchants created a store, then sold through other channels. 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
Couldn’t find how to publish products
Finished onboarding without creating a product
Hit technical issues
Merchants weren’t reaching the value of Pop-Up stores
An intrusive modal pulled merchants out halfway through store creation, some screens asked for information we never used, and bugs sometimes hid the main CTA.
It was one fragmented flow, and it wasn’t working in Pop-Up’s favor.
I took the audit to the PM and Head of Product and tied the drop in new stores to specific failures in the product.
Pop-Up hadn’t been a roadmap priority.
Pop-Up wasn’t on the roadmap because it had fewer users than other sales channels. With the rebrand coming, it moved to the top.
We split the work in two: fix the core journey first, then build verification for the payment change on the way.
03
Merchants
5+
Successful merchants publish 5 or more products.
Verified within 24 hours
Uploaded a logo
Published 5+ products
No one had defined what a successful merchant looked like, so I mapped what merchants did on the platform and looked for what correlated with sales.
Merchants who finished verification within 24 hours, uploaded a logo and published 5 or more products were far more likely to sell. That became our success metric.
04
Ownership
We had no ownership over our core journey
Watching session recordings, I found a rogue modal from the onboarding team redirecting merchants to a sales channel they hadn’t chosen.
Nobody had told us it launched.
The modal lived in another team’s codebase, so even a small fix meant a negotiation.
I proposed a small Success step
It sat at the end of store creation that celebrated the finished store. 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 test 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.
05
Guidance
Guiding merchants one job at a time
Printify was rebranding, and product teams were picking up jobs-to-be-done thinking. With the other designers, I used it to shape a flow that takes a merchant from creating a store to publishing a first product, with a moment to celebrate it.
Four value statements answer the 33% who didn’t understand what Pop-Up was for.
A simplified product step means new stores launch with a product already published, which addresses the 16% who finished onboarding with nothing to sell.
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.
06
Verification
90
To complete verification or your store will be disabled.
Verify your identity
Manage your own taxes
Reconfigure profit margins
Compliance requirements forced Printify to switch payment providers. Every merchant, including those already verified, had to verify their identity, manage their own taxes and reconfigure profit margins.
I split the experience by audience: active merchants needed urgency because of the deadline; new merchants needed a calm explanation of the process ahead.
Migrate or be forced to stop selling.
Peak season was close, and the biggest risk was Stripe flagging a legitimate merchant with no recourse, which could put a business at risk overnight.
We couldn’t fully control the experience
Verification opens in a separate window, so we couldn’t fully control it, but I applied our typography and colors so it felt like Printify.
To ship in time we used Stripe’s pre-built components.
Merchants never asked for this change. My job was to make it cost them as little effort as I could.
Nudging merchants to act
I proposed persistent banners and modals to guide merchants to verify.
Messaging in modals changes every week with increased urgency.
The tone shifted with how many products a merchant had published: the more products, the more encouraging the message.
Merchants who started but didn’t finish got reminders, and time-triggered modals appeared one month and one week before the deadline.
Active merchants had a deadline, so they got urgency. New merchants got a calm walkthrough of what was ahead.
I ran workshops with engineers
I ran workshops with engineers to map the logic and edge cases before we pitched other teams.
The PM and I got them to agree that our team would own banner behavior inside their codebase. We fixed banner bugs ourselves instead of queuing behind another team.
The banners had to work across every platform surface and merchant status.
I also set up a process with Support and Marketing for help articles and email campaigns. Only 0.4% of Support inquiries were about the redesign.
Disabled stores destroy trust
A disabled store showed a warning banner at the top, which made it look untrustworthy to visitors. I figured merchants who saw real traffic landing on a disabled store would have a reason to verify.
A temporarily disabled store shouldn’t be a dead end.z
I replaced the warning with an email signup field and added a dashboard widget showing visits and emails collected.
07
Rollout
91%
Of active merchants completed verification in the first two months.
The first release showed what broke
The rollout exposed bugs in the banners, the CTA and the Stripe flow. Fullstory doesn’t record inside Stripe, so the most important step was invisible to us.
Of merchants who published a product, started verification
Completed within 48 hours
Abandoned on the first try
We shipped first to 5% of merchants behind feature flags and reviewed Fullstory sessions weekly with the PM and team.
08
Learnings
Ownership was the biggest constraint
When a flow is split across teams, even a small fix means negotiating. Next time I’d settle who owns each journey before starting, so the team that iterates is the team that answers for the results.
A small step can matter most
The Success step cut the fragmentation and gave merchants a sense of completion. I didn’t expect it to matter that much.
Arrive with a plan
Workshops with engineers and close PM work let us pitch to other teams with confidence.