Shopify • Lead Designer • 2023
Driving first-time success through incentives
As a means of encouraging new leads and free trial merchants to complete essential tasks that are known to enhance long-term productivity, we are providing a $50 app store credit incentive. Our goal is to increase the probability of merchants contributing to Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) and to improve user retention. These tests will lay the foundation for productivity incentives across the Admin.
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Problem
Merchants are struggling to achieve sustainable growth and are facing challenges in quickly realizing value on Shopify's platform. The process of generating sales can take a significant amount of time. We need to improve the ease of identifying different growth opportunities, as the current system does not facilitate this effectively.
Proposal
Our aim was to evaluate the impact of productivity incentives on significant milestones within the admin's new user setup guide. The objective was to determine whether improving the completion rate of these milestones would lead to a more complete shop setup and therefore more successful merchants.
Impact & outcomes
Validating this strategy across 1.3M users established a scalable framework for driving merchant success and increasing long-term platform retention.
Gross profit
$12.7M
The estimated profit over 3 years.
Userbase
1.3M users
Tested worldwide for 3 weeks with a cooldown.
User journey
The user journey for early-stage merchants on Shopify begins when they sign up or log in to the Admin. Incentives are presented to the merchant within the Setup Guide on an individual task. Currently, we are offering $50 App Store credit as part of the initial user experience. After completing a task, the App Store credit takes three days to clear fraud checks (as required by the legal department) before being deposited into the merchant's account. Once the credits are granted, the merchant receives an email notification along with an in-app notification. If the merchant revisits the Setup Guide, the incentive information will be updated to confirm that they have received their credits and provide instructions for accessing the App Store.
Key milestones
When new users sign up for a Shopify store, they are presented with the initial Setup Guide, which will include our incentives. However, users will only receive a maximum of one incentive at a time. The tasks featured in the Setup Guide have been selected because they are known to correlate with higher merchant success rates over time. For instance, users who add a custom domain are more likely to attain weekly active sales. By motivating more users to complete this action, we could potentially create more successful merchants.
User experience
For each task featured in the Setup Guide, the incentive user experience adheres to a similar pattern. A small badge displaying the incentive offer (e.g., "Get $50 credit") is displayed on the task. Users can view additional details about the incentive by hovering over the badge, which reveals a tooltip. The incentive remains persistent in the Setup Guide once a task has been initiated. Once the user completes the task, the message is updated to inform them that they will receive their credit in a few days. This delay is necessary to allow the legal team to conduct fraud checks before releasing the incentive amount. Users will be notified of the credit's arrival via email, app notification, and Setup Guide task messaging. They can then use the credits to purchase items in Shopify's App Store.
Incentives should not be overly distracting or compete with the user's focus. Rather, they should serve to increase engagement with a particular task, and ultimately guide the user to what's best for them.
Incentive guidelines
The current project serves as the cornerstone for the future of incentives in the Admin. The UI design has been thoughtfully crafted to facilitate the use of a flexible "incentive" feature across numerous surfaces and components. This UX reintroduces links to the Polaris component library within tooltips and outlines the opportunities and limitations of how incentives can and should be utilized.
Skills & competencies
Key areas of expertise and methodologies applied during this project.