SumUp was making card payments easy for 1.5 million businesses globally with their POS systems and card readers. To help those businesses sell to a far larger number of customers and take orders online from around the world SumUp acquired Shoplo (think Shopify), an e‑commerce product company where I was working.

ContextIn 2019 at the time of acquisition Shoplo served 4500 online stores in Poland with GMV around €100 million. Shoplo offered online retailers a complete set of online selling tools:

1. Product catalogue and management
2. Payments
3. Store design/customisable themes
4. Customer management
5. Sales reports
6. Employee accounts, and more…
7. Email and notification features
8. Marketing and social media integrations
9. Plug‑in store

I joined Shoplo in 2018 and as the only UI/UX and Product Designer was responsible for and led all aspects of design – product design, design system, marketing designs (later on we recruited another designer so we could maintain quality at speed). In collaboration with product, development, marketing, data science, CS teams, we were developing new and improving existing features and as a result, improving customer success metrics, NPS, retention, increasing revenue.

ChallangeNow it was time to integrate Shoplo and make it a natural part of SumUp – make it SumUp Online Store Professional. I was responsible for the design side of the process which entailed:

1. Rethinking SumUp's information architecture and navigation to accommodate this and other new products to come
2. Rebranding and adapting Shoplo's core product
3. New marketing website and key visuals
4. Driving the evolution of Curcuit UI design system

Outcomes and insightsWe launched the product in Ireland with the intention of expanding after we understand the biggest issues on a small scale, but the main takeaway was that most SumUp's merchants didn't need a solution as complex as Online Store Professional. On the other hand they needed more functionality and customization in the other new solution we created specifically for SumUp users – Online Store Starter, a stripped-down, simplified version of an online store, allowing merchants to showcase their products or services and take payments directly via social channels such as Instagram.

This informed the team how exactly to transition to one product that sits in the middle, which was announced 1,5 years later in Oct 2021, and this product, Shoplo, was acquired by it's biggest competitor in Poland, Shopper.