Merchant Onboarding Portal.

The friction wasn't in the product — it was in the seam between two continents.

Huarui Cloud was scaling a cross-border B2B/B2C marketplace out of Nanjing into the North American market. Overseas merchants were landing on a platform designed and documented in Chinese, then handing the hardest questions — registration paperwork, verification requirements, payout setup, go-live checks — to a China-based support team that couldn't answer them at Pacific-time speed.

I joined the North American site app-building team in November as the operational business analyst. By the end of my first week I could see the same three questions cycling through the ticket queue four times a day.

Treat onboarding as a product, not a document.

Before writing anything new, I sat inside pre-launch QA for the North America app and ran structured tests against the merchant flow — surfacing 15+ blocking bugs the engineering team fixed before we opened the doors.

Then I ran the ticket log through a Python + SQL pipeline to see which questions actually got asked, in which order, and at which stage they broke. Four clusters emerged. Those four clusters became four product stages: Register → Verify → Train → Live.

Two shipped surfaces — one for the merchant, one for the ops team.

An AI-powered onboarding portal. Each of the four stages carries an interactive video tutorial — script and voiceover generated with AI, delivered in both English and Chinese — that walks a merchant through the exact screens they'll see, in the exact order they'll see them. Merchants can rewatch any step without re-queuing a support ticket, and stage-completion is tracked in a lightweight dashboard my ops counterparts in Nanjing watch in real time.

An automated order-tracking dashboard in Python and SQL. The most common post-launch ticket wasn't a bug — it was "where's my order?" I built a query layer over the fulfillment tables and wrapped it in a merchant-facing status view, so the answer arrives without a human in the loop. Common status inquiries now resolve themselves; the ops group spends its hours on the exceptions instead of the norms.

Fewer tickets, cleaner expansion, a shared vocabulary across time zones.

• Post-launch support tickets down ~30%.
• Cross-team status-inquiry time cut materially — ops hours redirected from lookups to exceptions.
• Onboarding scaled cleanly into additional North American markets without adding headcount to the China support team.
• The four-stage frame — Register / Verify / Train / Live — became the shared vocabulary between HQ product and NA ops.

The leverage was closing the loop.

My job was to see the pattern in the tickets, but the real leverage was turning the analysis back into a shipped surface merchants could use themselves. A dashboard would have documented the pain; a portal removed it.

Being bilingual mattered less than being willing to sit inside both time zones and translate not just language but intent — what a Nanjing product manager meant, what a North American merchant heard, and what belonged in the video versus in the code.