Printify
Tackling declining merchant activation rates and a business model change with improved store creation and merchant verification journeys.
E-commerce
5 months
2025
Key results
I designed, tested, rebranded and launched new journey's and processes to support Pop-Up stores business model change that enabled expansion into new regions.
Due to the sensitivity of impacted user journey's, we expected a drop in activations but compared to the control group, 9% more merchants initiated the store verification which is about 90% of all merchants.
How I contributed
Designed and launched store verification process for new and existing merchants.
Designed and launched a rebranded store creation flow that increased the number of stores created successfully.
Established ownership over a product area to gain more team autonomy and to enable more flexible future experimentation.
Discovered previously unknown bugs of which some were blocking the store creation.
My rebrand work helped to define how to use the new brand layouts.
In 5 months I helped the Pop-Up team to establish ownership and delivered improved versions of their core user journey's.
An e-commerce solution built in-house
Printify is a print-on-demand platform that enables you to create and sell custom products online.
Pop-Up Store is an e-commerce solution built in-house, similar to Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix.
It helps NGOs, nano and micro influencers to monetise their communities in an hassle-free way.
Core metrics decreasing
The main focus was to address decreasing merchant activation rates, indicating that users may find it cumbersome to complete the process of signing up, creating a store, publishing a product and verifying their store.
At the same time, it was decided to change the business model of the Pop-Up store to now include a new verification process for new and existing merchants.
Fewer and fewer merchants are experiencing the value and ease of Pop-Up stores.
Getting a feel for the product
I mapped the complete merchant journey from sign-up to a successful store creation. This helped to identify any potential blockers, learn which product areas are owned by which team and where other team priorities override ours. It also helps to gather a backlog of bug fixes and improvements.
As a new merchant, the onboarding flow from creating and publishing a product to creating and verifying a sales channel feels disconnected. Implementing a unified, guided flow could improve the overall user experience.
Data shows that people are confused
Working closely with the PM, we gathered data from Looker, Heap, experiment results from Optimizely, support tickets from Zendesk, and feedback from Pop-Up store surveys.
New and existing merchants were showing similar trends
26% could not understand the value of the Pop-Up store or how it works.
19% could not find how to publish products they created.
11% did not create a product during onboarding.
8% encountered technical issues.
Curiously, new and existing merchants were showing similar trends.
We identified what to focus on
At the beginning of this project, Printify started implementing a full platform rebrand. The decrease in our key metrics, combined with issues I identified, presented an opportunity for a major update.
Improve the Pop-Up store creation flow using the new rebrand guided layouts.
Educate merchants on the value of the Pop-Up store.
Make product publishing an obvious step during store creation.
Design an account verification process for all merchants.
Understand the impact of the business model change for existing merchants and design a verification flow that won’t disrupt their business operations.
What is a successful merchant?
Our top priority is to enable merchant success. The more sales they make, the more revenue Printify generates. To help merchants sell, we need to understand the difference between successful merchants and merchants that don’t yet generate revenue.
I identified all actions that merchants can take to start selling. Together with the PM, we mapped which of these correspond to merchants that make sales. This provided a crude idea of the nudges we can employ.
Most successful merchants verified their store within 24 hours, applied branding elements and published 5 or more products.
Establishing ownership over our own product area
To avoid disrupting existing merchants who are making sales, we decided to focus on new merchants to understand the impact of our solutions. We divided the store creation and merchant verification into separate projects.
I started with a simple proof of concept using the old designs because iterating is fast with our design system. The intention was to show ideas quickly, align stakeholders on the approach and then flesh out the full flow.
Any change we intended to make would overlap with areas that were owned by other teams. This created friction between teams. We needed to establish ownership over core Pop-Up store journeys'.
Introducing a Success step during store creation, created a space that we could own fully and run experiments in.
The addition of the Success page in the store creation flow, enabled our team to launch experiments and get data in an area we had limited visibility but no control before.
Feedback started flowing
All design work needs to gather feedback from the team, other product designers, and senior stakeholders who own the initiative. While the first draft was received positively, I gathered a lot of feedback for the next iteration.
The value proposition is a good add, but needs approval from the content marketing team.
The FAQ section is already part of the flow, but takes up considerable space.
Need to flesh out the whole end-to-end flow.
It was decided to move forward using only concepts from the new branding.
The theme section step should be updated, but it will have to wait until the store builder has been refined.
Our new design language provided more simplicity and enabled guided flows where focus is on the job to be done.
Feedback driven iteration
I tend to create many iterations. The old version goes into the archive, and focus moves to the new iteration. This allows me to get feedback from stakeholders on the approach and designers on the design details.
It is important to share work in progress with engineers because it helps to uncover edge cases and technical limitations. Most importantly, it helps to bring people along the design process from the very beginning.
Since we are still exploring guidelines how to use the new design principles, iterating quickly allowed me to ideate together with other designers and establish new patterns to follow.
When using a guided flow, the focus should be on completing a single job. Once the series of jobs are done, we want to celebrate merchants accomplishments.
Guiding merchants to success
Ideally, each screen would be focused on a single job to be done, realistically it creates a long flow with many screen changes.
So I bundled together basic information like store name, legal requirements and the value proposition. If you’re reading, might as well do it all in a single go.
The publishing step is a good place for educating merchants about costs that will determine their profitability.
We received feedback that merchants sometimes don’t find the promotions section and churn. Merchants value free shipping as a promotion so exposing it here allows us to test how this feature affects merchant success rates.
The success step will now serve as a place to experiment with different actions to understand how to better help merchants navigate the platform.
After a series of actions, we celebrate the merchant with an encouragement. It is worth dedicating a screen to it because it also helps to break up the onboarding flow.
Creating a store is just the beginning
Until now, merchants with a published product to their store had selling enabled by default. Buyers could visit a store and purchase a product as soon as it is launched. To get paid, the merchant would fill out a form to get their earnings after tax.
Printify is changing its payment provider to Stripe to de-risk operations, allow scaling internationally, and give more visibility to merchants about their business. Basically, tax responsibility will fall on the merchant from now on.
This means that once a store is created, merchants need to finish their account verification, submit a KYC form and pass verification checks by Stripe to enable the selling of published products.
It's important to note that we're not addressing our customer problem. We are mainly addressing a Printify problem and trying to limit Printify's liability.
Verification flow is important because merchants
Experience their onboarding without any additional disruptions.
Know that account verification is mandatory to enable selling.
Are guided and educated throughout the account verification.
Fully understand their verification status and are informed about next steps to enable selling.
New users are not yet familiar with the platform, so there was no concern that adding account verification might negatively impact the merchant experience.
Change is coming, please act now
While new merchants don’t have any time pressure to verify their stores, existing merchants do. Because of this, it was agreed to take a more aggressive approach in the way we communicate the business model change.
For existing merchants
There will be a single persistent banner to keep the message clear.
A banner for those who started but did not complete the verification.
Time triggered modals that:
1 month before the deadline: Appear once a week upon login.
1 week before the deadline: Appear everyday upon login.
Created support articles to explain changes and the different scenarios.
Created an email campaign for each banner and modal window.
Establish a continuous checkin with the support team to keep track of the types of support requests the Pop-Up store receives.
Changes for existing merchants are riskier and require active monitoring of their progress to catch any issues early.
Nudging to start the verification process
Merchants are guided to account verification using banners and modal windows throughout the platform. Messaging would change based on the amount of products the merchant has published. The more products published, the more encouraging the messaging.
3 banners that encourage to start account verification.
5 banners that show the verification status by Stripe.
It made sense to put the verification in store settings because all merchants visit this section. To avoid disrupting the onboarding process, merchants who haven’t created a product wouldn’t see any banners.
To measure the performance, we tracked
Merchant verification between treatment & control.
The conversion rate from each entry point.
Verification status from Stripe and segmenting these merchants.
Bounce rate for each verification step in the funnel.
Average time it takes to get verified.
The amount of products merchants create before starting the verification process.
Creating a banner strategy was challenging due to the lack of proper merchant segmentation and a shared codebase. Each change required alignment with other teams.
Clicking on the banner
Upon landing in Store Settings, merchants are informed why it is necessary to verify their store, concisely inform about impact and ask to check a box to continue.
That would load the Stripe embedded component and take merchants through the verification process, filling out the KYC form.
Stripe provided several components. We chose Stripe because it was the least amount of engineering effort.
Clicking “Add Information” would start the process by opening a new window that requires mobile authentication with stripe to create a merchant profile. Only after the KYC form would be displayed.
Luckily, we could customise the the form to match our brand.
Relying on third-party solutions limits our control over key aspects such as the verification flow, user messaging, experience design, and data collection.
Unverified stores can't sell
Normally, Buyers were able to make a purchase as soon as a product is published to a store. With the change in the business model, until a merchant has verified their store, we need to disable the cart on their store. While other platforms directly inform that a merchant is not verified, we did not want to communicate the status of the merchant.
Entering a store that is not verified can create trust issues with the brand. We wanted to avoid this potential scenario. While the probability of buyers entering an unverified store is low, it is not 0.
Instead of showing that the store is not available, I opted for a solution that would allow to collect customer emails.
The idea is that once a customer submits their email, the merchant can see a new widget on their dashboard that shows store visits and number of collected emails.
This should create an urgency to verify the store because the merchant is potentially leaving money on the table.
Merchants seeing that their unverified store is getting traffic is a great incentive to start the verification process.
Verification for existing merchants comes with concerns
Existing merchants have active and profitable businesses. They will need to migrate to the new business model and fill out the KYC during Q1, 2025. Otherwise, their stores will be blocked and selling disabled.
We’re concerned about
A decline in existing merchant verification.
An unknown number of merchants becoming inactive.
Breaking the business model of some merchants due to new accounting requirements that fundamentally change how they will need to calculate profit margins.
Losing an unknown amount of existing merchants due to Stripe flagging them as restricted or them abandoning the Pop-Up store or even the Printify platform.
We have to be mindful that we are imposing a change in how merchants can sell from now on and do everything to make the transition as smooth as possible.
Release and monitor
We use feature flags to test new features. We start with 5% of merchants and increase traffic depending on the results.
After any feature release, I dedicate time every week to watch Fullstory sessions together with the PM and any other interested team members.
With the first release we learned that
80% of merchants who publish at least 1 product, fill out the KYC form.
Approximately 60% of merchants become verified within the first 48 hours.
Banners don’t always show up when they have to.
The main banner CTA does not always lead exactly to the Verification tab.
The Stripe component does not always load. Or can load outside the bounds.
Many merchants who start the verification process abandon it.
We could not see what happens during the Stripe verification process becuase Fullstory does not record third-party embedded components.
Watching Fullstory sessions really helps to understand where merchants are having issues and helps to uncover bugs.
Same verification, different merchants
All merchants start the verification process from the store settings. Content on this page differs for new and existing merchants.
Existing merchants need to understand the value of the change to encourage to start the verification. They also need to accept the new Terms and Conditions since we are making changes to the business model and taxation.
New merchants need to understand why they need to verify their stores since they already agreed to the terms while creating their store. This was a change I pushed for.
Once terms are agreed upon, only then we can load the Stripe component and merge the verification flows for all merchants into one.
Aligning on banner logic with developers
Because of the different conditions that make it complicated to implement the verification logic, I found that the easiest way to get alignment was to do whiteboarding sessions with developers. Together with the PM, I would talk about the flow and different business aspects while developers would map the system logic.
Organising white boarding sessions with developers allowed us to match the business logic to the code, get the team aligned and uncover edge cases we were not expecting.
An impactful project
The project was a necessary update for the long-term success of the Pop-Up store. While the results of this project need to be observed over a longer time period, initial results show that the impact is positive.
9% more merchants initiated the store verification which is about 90% of all merchants.
2% drop in successful verifications due to stricter acceptance criteria. This is an overwhelmingly positive outcome due to the project launching during peak season.
Higher average order value and higher average order count value for merchants in the new verification flow.
From all Pop-Up store merchants, only 0.6% reached out to Support with questions and none were about the new changes business model.
Support received only general questions about the Pop-Up store with only about 4% asking about the verification process.
Even though we launched during peak season in December, we saw notable growth in GMV and merchant verification.
Next steps
Focus on the new store builder to expand store customisation options.
Update the promotions section and expand with new features and promotion types.
Streamline the mobile checkout experience.