Rebuilding compliance to unblock merchant activation

Postscript 2025 | Internal tooling + Merchant onboarding

B2B Product Design

Summary

Aug 13 – Oct 7, 2025

Context

At Postscript, compliance was the gate between sign-up and value, and it was breaking on both sides. Merchants routinely failed Toll-Free Number (TFN) verification, while the compliance team was buried in manual audit work. I led a two-part redesign across the merchant flow and internal tooling.

Outcome

Resulting in compliance audit throughput increased 50x (50 verifications in the time it previously took to complete one), manual reviews dropped 30%, and weekend shifts were eliminated. The result was faster merchant activation with lower operational overhead.

My role

Sole product designer on a cross-functional team with Product and Eng. I owned both initiatives end-to-end (from user research, problem definition and solution execution). I also advocated for decisions beyond the immediate scope, including email notifications and contextual alerts, to ensure the full compliance journey was covered.

Problem

Compliance process was broken on both sides

Postscript is an SMS marketing platform serving 18,000+ Shopify stores. Before merchants can send SMS, they must complete a compliance process that includes TFN verification with carriers and collecting opt-in evidence for subscribers.

On the merchant side, TFN submissions failed frequently. Nearly 1,000 resubmissions over six months created 330+ hours of manual compliance work. Merchants rarely understood why they failed or what to fix.

On the internal side, evidence was uploaded one screenshot at a time, requiring manual lookup and matching to Source IDs. A single audit could take hours of repetitive work, creating backlogs that delayed activation.

Merchant-side: Redesigning TFN Verification

Design thinking

TFN verification is a hard requirement at Postscript. Without it, merchants can’t launch popups, send campaigns, or even send a test message. Because submissions were failing so often, resubmissions became the main bottleneck.
Instead of optimizing resubmissions, I focused on preventing failures upfront by partnering with Compliance, Product, and Engineering to identify the most common rejection reasons and design targeted solutions to address them.

Collecting the right information upfront

I redesigned the TFN verification flow to collect accurate business information upfront. We discovered that Postscript was auto-filling addresses from Shopify, assuming they matched the legal business address required for TFN verification, which often wasn’t the case.

I added inputs for business registration details (EINs, international identifiers, and sole proprietor paths) and restructured the page to better explain what TFN verification is and how long it typically takes.

New TFN step during onboarding

Make status and failure reasons visible everywhere

Because TFN verification directly impacts access to core messaging features, I extended the experience beyond the initial onboarding step. I introduced contextual alerts across popups, campaigns, automations, and test message flows so merchants could immediately understand when they were blocked, why verification failed, and how to resolve it.

I also surfaced the most common rejection reasons proactively, allowing merchants to identify and fix issues before resubmitting. This reduced confusion and helped prevent repeated verification failures.

Various points where TFN status and action is surfaced

Pushed to close the gap in onboarding

I noticed a clear gap in the onboarding journey: merchants had no way to check TFN status unless they were in the product. To close that gap, I pushed for email notifications that kept merchants informed when verification succeeded or failed.

On success, the email nudged merchants to activate key features. On failure, it explained what went wrong and what to fix next, helping merchants avoid delays. This let us reach merchants during a critical trust-building moment, even when they were not actively in the product.

TFN success and failure emails

Impact 🎉

This new TFN verification experience reduced manual compliance reviews by 30% and eliminating weekend shifts for the compliance team. It also lowered resubmission rates, reduced onboarding friction, and helped merchants reach value faster by clearly guiding them through one of the most critical steps in the product.

Internal-side: Bulk Upload + Auto Verification for Compliance Audits

Design thinking

While TFN addressed the merchant side, the internal side had its own bottleneck. A single audit could take hours of repetitive work, creating backlogs that delayed merchant activation. I conducted user interviews with the compliance team alongside Product, walking through their end-to-end verification process.

This surfaced three core pain points:

Uploading evidence was tedious and repetitive (no bulk actions)
Manually finding the screenshots and matching it with the opt-in instances (Source ID) was time-consuming and error-prone
Low confidence in matching accuracy

Compliance Audit Process

Introducing bulk uploading files

I replaced the one-by-one upload flow with a bulk upload experience supporting up to 25 files at once. The system handles partial success, providing clear file-level errors without blocking progress. I worked with engineering to define upload limits around file count and size to ensure performance at scale.

Flow diagram comparing old and new upload process

Automated source ID ↔ File name matching

During research, I noticed the compliance team already followed consistent file-naming conventions when saving screenshots. Rather than asking them to change behavior, I designed an automated system that extracts Source Platform and Source IDs directly from file names. Ambiguous matches are flagged for user confirmation. This reduced lookup time and improved matching accuracy without adding new steps.

Leveraged existing file naming convention to automate, reducing manual input

Dedicated experience for uploading

My initial instinct was to introduce a dedicated modal, but I hit strong pushback to reuse the existing table and avoid creating a separate experience.

To make the tradeoff concrete, I designed the table-based approach in full fidelity. Seeing new uploads intermingled with approved evidence made the issue clear: it was harder to scan, harder to understand what was pending, and easier to miss actions.

I partnered with engineering to assess effort, and both approaches were estimated to take roughly the same time. With implementation cost no longer a differentiator, we aligned on the modal. It simplified the reviewer experience, made states more explicit, and reduced the risk of long-term complexity and edge cases.

Other lofi exploration: using existing table to display everything in on page

Auto-approval for internal uploads

To reduce unnecessary compliance overhead, I designed an auto-approval system for files uploaded by trusted internal users with a @postscript.io email address. This allowed the team to focus on higher-risk reviews.

Prototype

Impact 🎉

User feedback

Reduced upload time from ~1 hour to minutes for typical audits
Eliminated bottlenecks in the file-to-approval workflow, enabling audits to be completed in one day instead of multiple days
Improved confidence and accuracy in file-to-source matching

Reflection

Both projects reinforced the value of designing the system end to end. By addressing input quality and verification throughput together, we reduced friction for merchants and eliminated bottlenecks for the compliance team.