CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2032

Hello - 

We are making an addition to the newsletter this week. We are adding a section to list the apps and services that the target web sites use. That way if you are considering apps for your website you can see them deployed on top-performing websites to help you decide.

Let me know if you like it.

Let’s meet this week’s teardown target.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: SwiftWick.com

Company Profile

SwiftWick is an eCommerce site focused on performance athletic socks for a wide variety of sports and activities. They are a top 700 Shopify site and a top 100k website overall and are running Shopify Plus. Evidently socks are big business. They have their website, an Amazon store, and sell to sports and athletic shops nationwide. They have a substantial presence on Facebook, but transactions are redirected to the main website.

The Good Stuff

The website has a good design and great images that are attractive and on-brand. There is little to get in the way of customers who want to come to the site and buy.

Page speed LOOKS like a problem in the stats, but it’s not as bad as the speed measurement tools indicate. The reason is that the user experience is good with a first contentful paint being completed in less than 1 second (impressive) on desktop and mobile devices. The whole site takes more than 13 seconds, but all that stuff is happening in the background. I’d still advise them to clean up some of the speed issues, but they at least understand the user experience.

I like the email subscription form. It stays out of the way long enough to get started without being interrupted. It seems to be triggered once a person scrolls down the page to a certain point, which I like.

Their content strategy is solid with on-brand blog posts and great associated lifestyle imagery.

Apps They Deploy

We ran a scan to see what Shopify Apps they are deploying. Here’s what we found:

• Klaviyo — reporting and eCommerce analytics.

• Privy — email subscription maintenance and management.

• Facebook Tracking Pixels — the de facto standard for ad and social retargeting.

• Smile.io — customer loyalty.

• DoubleClick — new and retargeting ads.

This may not be a complete list.

Needs Improvement

The main menu is pretty good, but they have the Home page upfront. This is a waste of the most important menu real estate. People know to click the company logo. And there is an About Us link in the middle of the menu. If you want the About Us in the top menu, put it last. Let them have all the shopping options first. They also have a Dealer Login link … this should not be here at all. It should be in the footer. Customers should not be seeing this. In fact, in my opinion, the dealers should have a separate page or website to login and do their wholesale business.

SwiftWick has a great return and exchange policy. I had to hunt for it. I think they should deploy trust badges on the product pages and in the shopping cart as part of a risk-reversal strategy.

There is something wrong with the shopping cart page. It loads WAY too slow. I thought it was broken. I looked quickly at the code and there is something delaying/locking out the external payment calls and a delay in loading the payment icons for PayPal, ApplePay, etc. This is a MUST-fix item. I would be shocked if this was not a factor in cart abandonment.

So … let’s talk about page speed again. Because there are sixteen external calls that are simply failing to connect, display, or load. Sixteen! I think that some of these are related to the shopping cart issues, but there are others as well. This absolutely needs to be fixed. They should run through all of their external calls and clean up a lot of things.

On the Home page they have an Instagram image rotator that is supposed to display Instagram posts. In my tests, the images failed to load.

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They Should Call Us, You Should Too

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