Shopify
Scaling the Payouts System

Shopify: Scaling the Payouts System

Shopify developers built Shopify’s payouts for a single-currency world. No designer had touched the system before.

When I joined the Post payments team, we faced a daunting but straightforward brief: make payouts work globally without breaking trust, compliance, or the flow of billions in transactions.

Within months, we shipped a new framework that unlocked $50M+ in projected FX revenue and became the foundation for every future money movement tool at Shopify.

Shopify developers built Shopify’s payouts for a single-currency world. No designer had touched the system before.

When I joined the Post payments team — one PM, two engineers, and me — we faced a daunting but straightforward brief: make payouts work globally without breaking trust, compliance, or the flow of billions in transactions.

Within months, we shipped a new framework that unlocked $50M+ in projected FX revenue, and became the foundation for every future money movement tool at Shopify.

Project

Merchant Sales Payouts

Role

Senior Product Designer

Team

1PM 2 Engineers 1 Designer

Year

2023 - 2024

A System Outgrown

Payouts had no dedicated designer.

Shopify developers built payouts on the assumption of a single currency and lacked basic features such as transaction filters, bank references, and precise payout timing. I audited flows across providers and mapped the data model to design a coherent framework for entities, currencies, fees, and timelines.

Designing for Trust, Not Delight

Designing for Trust,
Not Delight

I rebuilt the experience from the inside out.

My focus was to fight for features that added transparency, such as a fee breakdown in payment details and the use of logos for payment methods.

The trade-off? Cutting planned scope on nice-to-have features like the timeline view.

Key contributions:

Designed a multi-currency payout system supporting FX conversion and multi-entity payments.
Collaborated with engineering to align APIs and display logic across integrations, ensuring unified statuses and error handling.
Partnered with content design to introduce clear error states and troubleshooting messaging.
Updating the team on discussed scope, development updates and timelines

Original payouts landing page

Original payout details

Original transactions table

Understanding payment processing

Designing for money means designing for trust. My job wasn’t to reinvent finance. It was to make payouts feel transparent and human.

Structure Before Style

We had limited engineering hours and a global release deadline. I led trade-off discussions, broke the roadmap into smaller deliverables, and built a clear implementation plan. When timelines slipped, I documented what we’d defer, ensuring leadership and engineering shared a single source of truth.

Design teams adopted the final design system across Shopify’s broader financial tooling, a testament to our collective effort to reduce design debt and accelerate new feature development.