Design Leadership

Shopify's checkout

Summary

I led design on Shopify's highest priority project to design and build a customizable checkout. 

It was successfully launched in 2022, with a value of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Hand holding a phone showing the Shopify checkout

Situation

Shopify’s legacy checkout was rigid and difficult to customize. Because of this, many merchants either moved onto third-party checkouts, or hired developers to do bespoke customizations, which would often “break” their checkout.

Problem for Shopify

$100s of millions of revenue bypassing Shopify.

Problem for users

Increased costs and complexity to make even the simplest customizations, and they were frozen on older versions of checkout, missing out on new functionality and compliance with WCAG, PCI DSS, GDPR, etc.

Org chart for the checkout UX team

Approach

  1. Build a new team from scratch

  2. Audit 1000s of stores

  3. Define design vision, quality, and principles

  4. Design a new end-to-end experience

Checkout extensions framework

Solution

Checkout as a platform

  • Extensions framework

  • Developer toolkit

  • Design system

  • Checkout Editor

Impact

  • Checkout platform launched in 2022

  • 100s of checkout apps on the Shopify app store

  • UI Kit has 1000s of users

  • Shopify doubled-down on checkout as a business differentiator