When joining StoreHub, the work focused on the team responsible for the merchants’ internal system (BackOffice) and all aspects of the online store. The online store became an exciting new addition for StoreHub, as it had previously focused solely on being a Point-of-Sale (POS) system. This new product provided merchants complete oversight of their inventory for both offline and online purchases.

The product manager and I quickly realized that merchants struggled to publish their online stores. Although the ability to launch online stores was introduced in November 2018, only 13.3% of the total accounts using StoreHub managed to publish an online store.

After digging deeper, it was found that the onboarding process for creating an online store proved overly restrictive and tedious.

Merchants had to follow an extensive checklist before they could publish their online store, and in most cases, many couldn’t complete it. For example:

• 76% of merchants didn’t have a logo on their store
• 83% of merchants didn’t provide their store’s name and email for customers to contact
• 85% of merchants didn’t provide their phone number for customers to contact
• 84% of merchants didn’t upload the required banner
• 91% of merchants had fewer than 10 products listed online
• 84% of merchants didn’t create a category
• 87% of merchants didn’t set up a shipping zone for their online store

It also took an average of 15.29 days for merchants to publish their online store. These factors highlighted that the online onboarding process was in need of major improvements.

With these glaring issues in mind, the team set out to achieve three main objectives:

1. Increase the publishing rate of online stores
2. Shorten the time it took for merchants to publish an online store
3. Help merchants reach their first five transactions faster

Removing unnecessary restrictions

Merchants had been required to complete every item on the checklist before publishing, though this was unnecessary. The team re-evaluated the items to see which ones were absolutely necessary, as the restrictions clearly hindered the ability of merchants to create an online store.

The list was reduced to four key steps:

1. Enter their online store’s name
2. Select which stores would be available online (if merchants had more than one outlet)
3. Create or add products to the online store
4. Enter the merchant’s bank details to receive weekly disbursements

This streamlined process enabled merchants to publish their online stores quickly and begin selling immediately.

Checklist improvements

The idea of having a checklist for onboarding had merit; however, requiring merchants to complete the entire checklist before publishing their store caused significant issues for many merchants.

The checklist was adjusted to be more visible, but no longer restricted publication. Instead, it served to encourage merchants to complete tasks that would enhance the credibility of their store and support marketing efforts.

Reminders and task prompts

It was anticipated that certain important settings might be overlooked, potentially causing online stores to malfunction. To address this, the team set up a “nagger” in the BackOffice dashboard to remind merchants to take essential actions

These naggers disappeared once the task was done and were limited to essential tasks only – ensuring that merchants weren’t overwhelmed by notifications.

The results?

Immediately after launching this, there was, as expected, an increase in published online stores. This also resulted in higher-quality of published stores, with much better sales numbers as the months progressed.

Post-launch, the number of published online stores increased by 5x. The time it took for a store to publish was reduced by 77.6%, lowering the average to 3.43 days. This marked a significant improvement, and several important observations were made:

1. A notable increase emerged in leads from small and medium-sized businesses looking to venture into e-commerce but lacked the know-how to do it.
2. Merchants became more motivated to complete the setup, provided they had the determination.
3. While it became easier to publish an online store, many businesses still struggled with driving traffic to their e-commerce site. Online marketing required a completely different approach compared to traditional marketing for brick-and-mortar stores.

After realizing this, further solutions were explored, though that is a story for another time. ?