Onboarding
Onboarding is the process that merchants follow to set up your app. The onboarding process is crucial to merchant success.
Purpose
Onboarding should welcome merchants and make them eager to use your app or feature. Onboarding makes merchants comfortable and sets their expectations as soon as they start using your app.
Merchants should feel like they know what to do in your app after they've completed the onboarding experience. This leads to higher usage retention.
Onboarding is about sharing your app's benefits and quickly getting merchants ready to use your app.
Onboarding should be brief and direct. Provide clear instructions and guide merchants to completion.
Guidance
Onboarding experiences efficiently guide merchants through your app's features so that merchants don't have to discover them on on their own.
A great onboarding experience presents the basics of your app to merchants as quickly as possible.
Onboarding experiences can also come in the form of a selection of actions that are quick and easy for merchants to understand.
In some cases, complex onboarding can take longer than expected. Give merchants the option to complete the onboarding at a later time to avoid stopping their workflow.
While there isn't a ready-made Polaris pattern for setup guides, you can compose your own with Polaris components and look for examples across the Shopify admin. A good setup acts as a quick start, with discrete steps that are automatically marked as complete. Including a progress indicator is another good practice that provides encouraging feedback to merchants.
Request information from merchants only if it's necessary.
If your onboarding isn't essential, then make it dismissible using a Polaris Cancel icon.
Avoid more than five steps in your onboarding process, as additional steps can lead to merchant drop off.
