Shopify Markets Pro

Leading the UX design for Shopify Markets Pro, the premium counterpart to Shopify Markets, was an exciting project for me. I led crucial design aspects of this significant initiative, collaborating with various teams in the Markets organization to steer this complex project and oversee the the end-to-end user experience for Shopify Markets Pro.

Problem

Cross-border commerce offers significant growth potential for merchants, but also introduces operational and legal challenges such as import duties, taxes, shipping rates, fraud, and legal restrictions, posing significant overhead and legal risks for merchants.

Markets Pro, in a partnership with Global-e to aimed to address many of these challenges. One of the key challenges for us was to transform the process that Global-e was doing on their own with huge sales and customer success efforts and transform this into a self-serve experience that works right for Shopify merchants.

Goal

With Markets Pro, our aim was to offer merchants a unified solution to eliminate operational and legal challenges, enabling them to expand effortlessly to over 150 countries with a single click.

Approach

Fundamentally, the end-to-end experience with Markets Pro can be split into five different phases:

• Sell
• Pre-Application
• Application
• Activation
• Usage

During my time working on Markets Pro, different teams were focusing on various phases of the experience. While I oversaw the end-to-end experience, my primary focus areas were Pre-Application, Application, Activation, and some parts of Usage.

01. Sell

This phase primarily concentrated on marketing efforts within the Shopify admin and externally through landing pages, email outreach, and other channels.

Within the Shopify admin, we used multiple channels to promote Markets Pro and shared compelling insights with eligible merchants to spark their interest in trying out Markets Pro.

02. Pre-Application

Given the complexity of Markets Pro and certain key limitations (e.g., initially offering only DHL Express as the shipping method), we needed to ensure that all merchants went through the same educational materials.

The initial limitation of supporting only DHL Express for shipping presented a significant challenge, prompting multiple iterations and clearer communication of the benefits of DHL Express.

03. Application

In the application phase, our main goal was to collect essential data for Global-e to allow them to make a decision on whether to act as the Merchant of Record for a specific merchant for all internal sales. This process shared similarities with standard Know Your Customer (KYC) procedures and other internal Shopify workflows like those related to Shopify Payments.

While our ultimate goal was to streamline processes and remove the necessity for an application flow for most merchants in the long term, this initial step was vital during the early stages of Markets Pro. It enabled a targeted focus on high-quality merchants and built trust with our partners to handle international responsibilities.

04. Activation

Once a merchant is approved to use Markets Pro, we would guide them through a series of activation steps. These steps do not involve any actual tasks but are aimed at educating them about the modifications Markets Pro would introduce to their store for their internal customers.

In the development phase, we categorized the information and steps of the Activation into two buckets: "What the fuck?" and "Good to know". These concepts effectively conveyed the emotions we aimed to avoid (What the fuck?) and evoke (Good to know) among merchants when they started using Markets Pro.

The activation was a crucial step for us initially because Markets Pro introduced numerous changes to the international aspect of merchants' stores, and reversing these changes was a time-consuming process.

05. Usage

Markets Pro functions as an underlying product, seamlessly integrating into Shopify to introduce enhancements, provide additional information, and improve functionality across multiple areas. There isn't a separate interface where a merchant explicitly "uses Markets Pro" as it is deeply integrated within Shopify.

This integration covers different elements such as orders, products, shipping labels, HS codes, checkout processes, and more. Collaborating with various teams throughout Shopify was crucial to coordinate essential modifications and smoothly incorporate them into the platform.

Outcome

As outlined above, Markets Pro was a significant undertaking that required deep integration into various aspects of Shopify. In my role leading UX design from inception through EA (Early Access) to closure before GA (General Availability), we gained valuable insights. Early product limitations, such as exclusive support for DHL Express, surfaced as significant obstacles hindering merchant progress.

Shopify Markets Pro is a turnkey operations solution—it's like adding a new department to your team.

Despite temporary constraints, such as the DHL Express exclusivity, we forged impactful success stories with our merchants from the project's early stages.

Notably, case studies like WOLFpak sees a 528% increase in cross-border revenue with Shopify Markets Pro or Glamlite increasing their growth in international sales by 2.25 times underscored the remarkable collaborative efforts of diverse teams involved in the project.