Onboarding Teardown - Shopify

As part of my submission for Highlevel's processes, I have documented this detailed teardown for Shopify.

Shopify Overview:

Shopify is an ecommerce platform that allows companies, big or small, to sell their products online and make ecommerce available to everyone. Their offering includes all digital touchpoints that a company would need to start and sustain their business including building a website to manage inventory, collecting payments and managing sales reports.

Shopify allows non tech driven businesses or owners in reducing their time to market with no requirement of understanding their needs, pain points by themselves. Customizations within the platform allow for a personalised differentiated experience that companies can provide to their customers while still using the same backbone of services.

Strengths:

• Easy to navigate and use platform
• Scalable and reliable
• Sales and marketing functionality
• Supports app ecosystem

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Core Value Proposition:

To make ecommerce available for every business who wants to sell their products online. This means that anything that is needed to build and keep a business alive who is selling products online would be catered to by Shopify, at some point in time.

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Challenges Shopify is facing today:

Shopify started as a market disruptor and has added a lot of stability and trust on their product, today it lacks in certain areas where new players are emerging with better models and distinguished offerings. Some challenges that Spotify faces that leads to churn:

• 3rd party app costs are high and it takes time to figure out which one would be best for your use case
• Transaction fees on the higher side
• Limited customizations on website
• No or limited email outreach depending on the plan
• Expensive paid themes
• No or limited marketing automation depending on the plan
• Difficult exit that helps them in the short run but leads to bad word of mouth & repute

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Products and Pricing:

Shopify has direct pricing and features list provided in detail that creates transparency and helps the user in choosing the right plan for them. And while this plan initially looks good and competitive to the market, the user would soon realise that the platform has limited basic features and for any sort of add-ons or customization they need to use apps from the Shopify App Store where many apps are paid or pay per use. This adds a tremendous load on the total budget that a company may keep aside for Shopify. It's good for users who are aware of this before buying and have consciously decided to either not use the paid options or pay for the add-ons.

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​Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs):

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Jobs to be done:

Product Teardown:

While Shopify website is viewed from both desktop and mobile web platforms, 70% of the traffic comes through desktop and hence we have used this platform for our teardown.

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As part of this teardown, we would look at the following journeys:

1. Product discovery on search (Shopify and Ecommerce Payments)
2. Onboarding on Shopify
3. Payment Settings on Shopify
4. An example of how payment journey on the ecommerce website that integrated with Shopify looks like

Detailed Teardown of the journeys: 

Shopify Teardown.pdf​

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Key Highlights and Insights:

1. Shopify uses clean and crisp language on all the platforms where product discovery happens - Organic and Paid Ads
2. The use of colours, text, videos, moving images, etc. is done efficiently to give a seamless experience and progressive disclosure is focused
3. Clean UI with an understanding on positive and negative spaces presents all features to the user in a delightful manner
4. It is relatively easy to set up the base shop and features for beginners
5. While the language is crisp, regional or localization based on region is missing in the content on the landing pages
6. Context is missing between different folds where which user or ICP is focused on changes drastically - INR 20 (Frugal or low budget or early entrepreneurs) is shown right before showing big global brands and USD numbers; This can confuse both ICPs (Early and Mature Scale companies) in terms of reach
7. While the payments journey is very intuitive in a few places, it lacks depth of intuition in certain where feedback and recommendations are given in the document
8. Payment settings configuration is very limited and requires users to install multiple additional apps from Shopify store after evaluating each plugin separately. This leads to more time, energy and money for the customer for even basic features.

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What could be primarily done differently to get better results?

1. ​Add relevance to the discovery journey based on geographical context of the user
2. While Shopify has tried to reduce costs for early stage users, most of the advanced features advertised are paid unlike competitors that give out a few of these features built-in as part of the base offering like ‘Addresses pre-filled based on customer’
3. Upfront transaction fees transparency is being provided by competitors that are trying to create differentiation
4. UI/UX can be more intuitive while using the data that the user provided while being onboarded on the platform. Ready personalizations based on the selections can be done on the platform
5. A walkthrough of the platform (automated) can help when the user is onboarding for the first time, similar to how video games do demo walkthrough before you play your first game