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End-to-end service design research to understand and reimagine the Shopify Fulfillment Network merchant onboarding experience — mapping a fragmented, 100-day journey across siloed internal teams to enable platform-level scale.

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Company: Shopify · Product: Shopify Fulfillment Network

Methods: Service Blueprint · Contextual Inquiry · Job Shadowing · Moderated Interviews · Behavioral Data Analysis · Field Study · Concept Testing

Shopify Fulfillment Network’s first in-product onboarding experience.

Overview

Shopify Fulfillment Network’s (SFN) merchant onboarding spanned an average of 100 days — but no single team owned the full journey.

• Sales, Merchant Success, Warehouse Ops, and Finance all touched different parts of it, with no unified view.
• This project built that view from scratch: a service blueprint mapping the entire onboarding ecosystem, combining job shadowing, multi-team interviews, and behavioral data to pinpoint where the experience broke down and how to fix it at platform scale.

Approach

Conducted job shadowing across sales calls and warehouse operations — studying the full system, not just the digital product layer

Live sketching flows and journeys and validating them with participants during job shadowing.

Ran semi-structured interviews with merchants and all internal operations teams: Sales, Merchant Success, Warehouse Ops, Finance

A plotting activity that informed service blueprint.

Built a full service blueprint mapping the current onboarding state and layered in behavioral data to map time-to-first-transfer (20 days) and time-to-first-fulfillment (25 days)

Ran nested concept testing on dashboard and onboarding flow designs before the final stakeholder pitch

A slide from nested concept testing report.

Impact

• SFN successfully scaled to 1,000+ merchants on target
• Decreased time-to-close and time-to-first-fulfillment for onboarding merchants
• Service blueprint became a living planning tool across product and operations teams
• Research directly contributed to Shopify starting a dedicated service design team