A better beginning for creators.

The opportunity

Popshop Live connected creators, businesses, and shoppers through e-commerce, video clips, and live shows within a community marketplace. Sellers included influencers, small businesses, brands, and individuals.

Patrick was engaged to assemble, mentor, and train a team of designers and user researchers. The mandate was to help Popshop Live become a destination for fast fashion while preserving and supporting its existing marketplace and influencers.

The original case study also gives historical context for CommentSold: founded in 2017, it had processed more than $3.7 billion in sales, served 22 million customers, and supported more than 7,000 creators and retailers. Those figures describe CommentSold’s platform scale, not Popshop Live’s results or Patrick’s individual contribution.

Understanding the onboarding problem

In the marketplace model described at the time, creators submitted an application before selling. Joining as a seller or shopper was free, and sellers paid a 6% commission. These are historical details of the experience being studied.

Event tracking and behavioral analytics revealed that prospective sellers were dropping off before successfully establishing their storefronts. Patrick’s team combined customer journey mapping with mixed-method research, working directly with customers to understand their motivations and the barriers to onboarding and rapid storefront creation.

Connecting experience to business priorities

Patrick aligned product initiatives with organizational priorities and made the relationship between user experience and business performance explicit. Research identified the demographic information needed during onboarding to better support sellers and influencers, alongside the metrics needed to monitor engagement and adoption.

This created a basis for understanding who was joining, where they encountered friction, and how their behavior changed as the marketplace evolved.

Creating a continuous research practice

A user research charter team established ongoing engagement with customers. Patrick also built a pipeline of willing research participants so the team could validate concepts before engineering began.

That recurring customer input supported an iterative cycle of feature prioritization and experience improvement, connecting product decisions with the needs of both new sellers and the existing marketplace community.

The outcome

The original case study reports increased overall engagement, more repeat visitors, and growing adoption of live selling following the marketplace update. It records monthly active user growth of 15–20% month over month during the period described.

The account also reports reduced churn and closer alignment with successful e-commerce practices through pre-engineering concept validation. The larger active audience supported continued monitoring of conversions and customer demographics.

These figures and marketplace terms describe the historical engagement, rather than current platform performance or pricing.