Shopify sells domains as an accredited registrar partner reseller, letting merchants manage DNS, renewals, and business operations in one place. Our team identified that merchants found the renewal process confusing and difficult to manage, often leading to missed renewals and loss of domain access. My goal was to give them more control with clearer visibility into payment and renewal status, streamlining the self-serve experience to be more intuitive and efficient.
Friction occurs when renewals fail or are not set to auto-renew. This is a significant issue because auto-renewal attempts fail more than 40% of the time. Due to unclear email communications and a lack of status visibility in the admin, merchants often discovered their domain had expired only after their store went dark. This forced users into a manual support process that accounted for 13% of all domain-related inquiries.
My research included usability testing on email messaging, reviewing support tickets, and competitive analysis. This informed the design of a self-serve renewal experience that replaced the need to contact support: clearer status indicators, a specialized checkout flow, and an overhauled notification ecosystem that gave merchants actionable steps to resolve issues on their own. Working closely with engineering and product management throughout, we held weekly syncs to stay aligned, moving quickly without losing quality.
Shipped December 2025, followed by all email updates in January 2026. The platform now sees 150 attempted manual renewals per day through the self-serve flow. Renewal-related support tickets dropped by 65 per day, and renewals previously handled by support fell from 70 to 5 per day. By empowering users to resolve issues independently, the design successfully mitigated automation failures and protected the digital identities of thousands of merchants.
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