Developer documentation and setup
Shopify Marketplace Kit
Shopify is rapidly becoming one of the largest ecommerce platforms in the world, it not only provides stores to merchants but point of service systems, warehouses, logistics, and of course, Shop Pay. The famous, 1-click payment system that won many an accolade.
Because Shopify commerce is so versatile, reliable, and advanced, more and more third parties wished to introduce its features to their platforms. We had the tools but didn't have the guide book for them, and that's what Shopify Marketplace Kit was called to achieve.
Company /
Shopify
Role /
Content Designer
Duration /
1 year
Dates /
2020-2021
Project brief
User problems
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Shopify has a rich collection of pre-developed commerce features that can be integrated into other platforms but no easy way to explain how to do it.
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Developers from other platforms overload Shopify's dev support with questions and requests for guidance.
Product solutions
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A convenient, structured, well-organized documentation with clear guidance.
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Diagrams and UI support to exemplify how the features will look.
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Roadmaps and customizable tutorials on how to build a complete tailored marketplace on any platform with Shopify components.
Links to check out
This project has so many links to take a look at,
I'm collecting them here for your convenience.
My impact
Documentation IA and UX guidelines
Shopify commerce has a convoluted roadmap and I had to distill the most common route developers take in integrating features to structure the documentation we had. We also developed specific content and design guidelines in GitHub.
Storytelling for developers
A lot of features were pretty hard to explain and some of them required high levels of understanding of the tech nuances of Shopify, which outsiders simply didn't possess, despite being engineers. I had to develop bite-sized stories and descriptions for every feature to walk them through the possibilities and types of integrations. It was so challenging and fund I wrote a blog post about it for Shopify UX.
Illustrative content and diagrams
Paired up with the designer, we created multiple helpful diagrams to help unpack the inter-platform relations. I initiated and drafter a lot of them and once we launched, those diagrams were a hot topic for the customer devs: they absolutely loved them.
Replicating Shopify
Creating the guidelines aimed at making sure that whatever gets built is on par with what our merchants and customers expect from the Shopify brand.
Specifically if it ends up being an app for Shopify merchants that allows them to sell directly on another platform, like we did with Instagram, Meta, and TikTok.
Click the image to view larger version.
Marketplace Kit was the most technologically heavy project I've done. I was lucky to then report to a fantastic content designer Dana Young and work on the project with her.
Our collaboration and the creativity of our product designer allowed us to deliver a bright, easy-to-follow, illustrated guidebook instead of a list of boring and convoluted tech docs.
I'm pretty happy about that.