Self-service onboarding for a new merchant vertical, built in 30 days
Setting up a new merchant took manual steps across several tools. I built a flow where the merchant fills in their details from one secure link, the team reviews them, and one publish step sets everything up across the internal systems.
The process, before and after
On the team’s side, only the review and the publish click need a person. Tap why? to see the reasoning.
- SalesCreates the deal
- MerchantFills in one secure link on their phone
- TeamReviews the submission
- TeamClicks publish
- AutomaticVenue live, CRM linked, print artwork ready, team told in Slack
The flow
The merchant completes a secure, expiring link on their phone, with validation on the way in. After an internal review, publishing configures them through the company’s existing APIs, reads the settings back to confirm they were saved, and links the CRM records. The slow work runs in the background.
The same flow produces the print artwork the merchant needs, as vector files generated by a small PDF writer I wrote for it.
Decisions
- Confirm every write by reading it back, rather than trusting a success response.
- No automatic rollback across systems. A half-finished setup is visible and fixable; an automatic undo would be a second source of bugs.
- An offline test suite for the logic, so changes can be checked without touching production.
Before and after
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Setting up a merchant | Manual steps across several tools | A form, a review and one publish |
| Print artwork | Made by hand | Generated from the form |
This describes internal work at qlub. Names, internal rules and business data are left out on purpose. If you want the detail behind any of it, email mikaeel2013@gmail.com and I will walk you through it.