Shop, ship, delivered

Shopify had a unique opportunity: with millions of merchants already on its platform, it could extend its e-commerce offering from storefront all the way to the customer's doorstep. That ambition became the Shopify Fulfillment Network (SFN), a multi-billion dollar business unit.

SFN's early growth model relied on sales calls to onboard every merchant. These calls served real purposes — screening risky merchants and products, confirming eligibility, and walking merchants through complex pricing. But they were a bottleneck. Twice as many merchants were blocked from activation as were using the logistics service, but SFN needed to reach 30,000 active merchants by end of year, up from 5,000 at the start of the project. At that scale, a sales-led model simply wouldn't work.

The challenge, then, was building a self-service onboarding experience that could screen merchants and products, confirm eligibility, and answer pricing questions — all without a sales person in the loop.

There were several nested problems to solve, each requiring its own solution and a fair amount of internal negotiation:

• Simplifying pricing
• Removing outdated eligibility blockers
• Replacing sales calls with self-service screening

Fulfillment pricing is genuinely complex — it involves dimensional weight calculations across size, weight, warehouse time, and shipping distance. Until now, sales reps had handed merchants a spreadsheet to work it out themselves.

My team designed two self-service calculators: one for marketing pages (no merchant data available, estimate-based) and one for post-login (personalized quotes using actual store data). We started with the marketing surface to improve top-of-funnel conversion. After launch, logins from those marketing pages to the SFN application increased by 7%.

Merchants were being blocked for sensible reasons in the network's early days, but these blockers no longer aligned with goals:

• Less than three months on Shopify
• Fewer than 3 daily orders
• Not approved for Shopify Payments

I found that well over 5% of merchants in our total addressable market were hitting these blockers. And many of these were new merchants intending to switch from other providers (so "less than three months with Shopify" was particularly bad).

After negotiating with my PM and Sales peers, we removed all but one requirement — Shopify Payments approval, which we kept as a proxy for Terms of Service compliance. The blocked merchant rate immediately dropped from over 5% to under 1%.

This was the most complex piece — and required the most stakeholder management.

Sales team: The sales team understood the model needed to change, but where to draw the line was a sticking point. Working with our data team, I found that 90% of existing merchants had fewer than 40 average daily orders. We agreed that these merchants would be self-serve only going forward, while merchants above 40 ADO (roughly $2–4M/year revenue) would be eligible for a white-glove option with sales staff access. This preserved existing quota and commission structures, which was critical to getting alignment.

Data team: Early in the project, the data science team was confident their product risk model API — which would programmatically score merchants and route them based on risk — would be ready at launch. It wasn't. We had to find another way.

We audited the nearly 60 eligibility and risk factors used in the existing process. Going line by line, we eliminated factors that were no longer necessary and automated those that could be resolved using merchant store data. That left 5 factors we couldn't remove or automate before the risk model was ready. We'd have to ask merchants about these directly — a calculated friction trade-off to keep the funnel moving.

Mid-project, Shopify acquired Deliverr, a fulfillment competitor with capabilities SFN didn't yet have (custom packaging, FIFO inventory tracking, etc.). With two siloed warehouse networks now in play, we needed to route merchants to the service that best fit their needs while the systems were integrated — a process that would take roughly a year.

I led the alignment across sales, data, and management teams from both SFN and Deliverr. We landed on the following routing logic:

• Merchants with complex needs → Deliverr recommended (but not forced)
• Merchants with simpler needs → SFN
• Merchants with 40+ ADO → choice of self-serve or white-glove sales support

After all of the above, we aligned on a streamlined two-screen questionnaire — asking merchants the minimum questions needed to route them to the right service or surface a sales conversation where warranted.

Three months after launch we saw an 8x increase in Transfers Created (merchants creating shipping plans to send inventory to warehouses), a 4x increase in Activation (merchants with at least one sellable item in the network) and the average days to activation dropped from 38 to 21.

This put SFN comfortably on pace to hit its 30,000 merchant goal within months of shipping and de-risked the time it would take to merge the two warehouse networks and associated systems.