Markets Pro

International demand was never the hard part — Shopify merchants already had buyers abroad. The hard part was everything that happened after someone clicked buy: duties landing wrong, tax registrations they didn't know they needed, payouts and FX behaving in ways finance couldn't explain, and support tickets that started with “why was this order held?” instead of “how do I grow?”

Shopify merchants wanted to reach international customers — but the complexity of duties, taxes, currency conversion, and compliance made cross-border selling feel inaccessible. Most merchants who tried ran into problems they hadn't anticipated and couldn't easily solve.

Markets Pro was built to remove that barrier entirely — a white-label merchant of record product that handled the complexity on the merchant's behalf. I volunteered for this project, got a greenlight from my design manager, and drove the foundational design and alignment work before handing off to another designer to carry through launch.

From the outside, “turn on international selling” sounds like a toggle. On the inside, it is a bundle of regulated workflows that don't fail politely — they fail as chargebacks, blocked shipments, and conversations with accountants. Merchants experience that bundle as a single broken promise: “I thought Shopify handled this.”

• Import duties, local tax obligations, currency hedging, shipping partners, localized storefronts, per-product availability per market — each one is a discipline in its own right.
• Most merchants didn't know what they didn't know. The gaps only became visible after a failed order, a customs dispute, or a tax liability they weren't expecting.
• And internally, no one could agree on which of these problems Markets Pro was actually solving — or for whom.

When I joined the project, there was no shared definition of the problem. Product, engineering, legal, and design each had a different mental model of what Markets Pro should do and who it was for.

That ambiguity showed up everywhere: conflicting roadmap narratives, designs that solved different problems depending on who you asked, and endless “what about…” threads that never converged. My first move wasn't more UI — it was forcing a single map of the journey we could all point at and argue about constructively.

Before the workshop, I pressure-tested the milestone model with a few stakeholders so the room wouldn't get stuck on structure. The goal was physical, shared memory: make invisible disagreements visible, quickly, without anyone feeling singled out.

I designed and facilitated a full-team workshop with nine participants — one product marketing manager, two PMs, three designers, and three engineers. I mapped five product milestones across all four walls of the conference room: Eligibility, Onboarding, Activation, Configuration, Offboarding.

• Each person wrote questions they had at any milestone on stickies — before or after the milestone, anything unresolved or unclear.
• For areas of risk, I asked them to place a cutout of a bomb and write out why that area felt dangerous to them.
• The room was bare when we started. By the end, every wall was covered. The patterns were impossible to ignore.

Once the walls were full, the conversation stopped being abstract. The same hazards appeared in different handwriting, from different teams — proof that we weren't dealing with isolated opinions but a systemic pressure point in the product model.

Across every discipline, the same cluster of risk surfaced: prohibited products being sold into prohibited countries. Legal, engineering, and product had all sensed it independently — but had never seen it mapped against the same milestones at the same time.

Merchant-of-record products often swing between two bad UX poles: overwhelm people with compliance detail they can't act on, or oversimplify until the product feels magical — right up until something breaks in production and trust collapses. Markets Pro needed a narrower path.

The eligibility work changed what “safe simplification” could mean. We weren't hiding risk; we were removing entire classes of failure modes up front so the experience could stay legible without being naive.

• Exposing too much gave merchants a false sense of control over things they couldn't meaningfully manage. It also created decision paralysis at onboarding.
• Hiding too much left merchants exposed to surprises they didn't see coming — which eroded trust faster than friction ever would.
• The eligibility guardrails gave us the confidence to abstract more. Because the risky edge cases were already excluded, the product could afford to be simpler than it otherwise would have been.

The work I owned was the hardest part to do well — taking an ambiguous, contested problem space and turning it into a clear product direction with team alignment behind it. Onboarding and eligibility were designed to a point of confidence. The broader experience had enough definition that another designer could take it through to launch without losing the thread.

Handoff, for me, included the boring essentials: annotated flows, decision logs, and explicit “why we didn't do X” notes so the next designer didn't have to replay the workshop in their head. The goal was momentum without superstition — launch quality shouldn't depend on one person's memory.

Where I spent my time. Workshop facilitation · UX research · Eligibility & onboarding · Stakeholder alignment · 0-to-one

Early numbers don't tell the whole story, but they do test whether the foundation survived contact with reality. The cohort was intentionally small and selective — enough to prove operational readiness without pretending we had solved every edge case on day one.

Eight merchants — hand-selected through the manual rollout — processed $6 million in gross merchandise volume across approximately 12 countries in Q1. The deliberate eligibility approach meant the merchants who got access were exactly the right ones: globally ambitious, high-volume businesses the product was built for.