France passed a law mandating that all merchants selling in France use a certified system of record that can be used to investigate tax fraud. In order to comply with this law Shopify shipped an app that allows merchants to easily export their shop data in the correct format encrypted with a passkey for the French government. We shipped a 1st-party app after a rigorous discovery phase that involved reading and interpreting the law with Shopify’s legal counsel, and meeting with French tax authorities to demo potential design solutions. 2019

Shopify merchants with a variety of product types and sizes needed a way to charge different shipping costs for these products. We introduced the concept of shipping profiles, enabling merchants to organize their products and set shipping prices according to the attributes that affect the shipping cost. We considered how merchants charge different prices according to the shipping destination, origin, and if the shipment was fulfilled by a 3rd party fulfillment service. 2018-2019

Shopify negotiated discounted shipping rates for merchants when they buy shipping with USPS, Canada Post, DHL, and UPS inside Shopify. Integrating each of these shipping carriers came with unique design challenges relating to the specific features, settings, physical limitations, and pricing models of each carrier. We adapted Shopify’s shipping design as carriers and features were added, like the option to require a signature when shipments are delivered. 2016–2018

After Shopify merchants purchase shipping inside Shopify they need to print the shipping label. Some merchants print with specialized label printers, while others print their labels on 8.5x11 paper and tape the labels to their packages. We designed a new settings section to let merchants specify their printer type. This allowed Shopify to generate their label in the correct size and format. 2017

Shopify merchants with several employees needed a way for employees to leave comments for each other on customer orders. Comments could be related to fulfillment, inventory, or customer communication that happened off the platform. We decided to combine the comments feature with a UI refresh of the order events timeline in order the display the timing of the comments in context of preceding and subsequent order events. 2015

Gasket was a product connecting data from SaaS apps to Google Sheets. Design decisions were constrained by each app’s API endpoints, the variety of data types that could be pulled into Sheets from each app, Google’s API rate limits, and their restriction of custom UI to a sidebar within Sheets. We identified the common fields across SaaS app types to build connections between them. 2015