CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2034

Hello -

As I sit here writing this it is Labor Day. That means that when you are reading this email tomorrow morning, it will be AFTER Labor Day. And there are 2 things that they say AFTER Labor Day:

1. You’re no longer supposed to wear white.

2. It’s now only 80 days until Black Friday.

Get those tasks submitted now folks.

Here is this week’s teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: PixiBeauty.com

Company Profile

Pixi Beauty is a very successful Shopify store. They are a women’s cosmetics line with a focus on skincare. They pursue an omnichannel strategy. In addition to their top-500 Shopify site, they have a company store on Amazon and a substantial, multi-prong wholesale channel to both big-box retailers like Target and Sephora to smaller boutiques. They also support the online efforts of smaller eCommerce stores.

The Good Stuff

Pixi Beauty is successful for a reason. Yes, they have great products and have done a lot of great work building a multi-dimensional business. But they have a really strong and consistent presentation on their website. The photos are on brand and the site is very shoppable.

I love how they incorporate Instagram images toward the bottom of the page. They have a cool Call-To-Action (CTA) of “Show Us Your Glow” that I think works on brand and encourages customer posting. While most of the images are product “selling” images, there are several examples of customer-generated and influencer content. Do NORE of this guys!

The shopping cart is clean and efficient. It pops up right away so that customers can buy fast. And they have multiple instant checkout options deployed on a single button! Very nice.

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.

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

Back in Stock — automated product availability notification system.

Smile.io — customer loyalty.

BackInStock — inventory tracking auto-updater

ShopifyPay/PayPal/ApplePay — payment gateways everyone should use

DoubleClick — new and retargeting ads.

ZenDesk — customer support.

This may not be a complete list.

Needs Improvement

OK … simple stuff first. Pixi Beauty has nice photos, but poor implementation of ALT tags. It’s a huge missed SEO opportunity AND a legal liability. And on the Product pages they do not follow best practices for SEO content and headings. They also do not deploy trust badges. Again, the product pages work but these are missed opportunities.

Now the harder stuff. At the risk of repeating myself, page speed is terrible. I do understand the importance of images to a site like this. Images are the primary selling vehicle here. But the images appear to be fairly well-formatted for speed. Here’s the thing … this homepage has 286 external calls. A detailed breakdown of all of that is outside the scope of this report, but let me put this into perspective. Our baseline standard is to have less than 100 eternal calls — they are 3x that. And we sampled/tested the Pixi Beauty page for Target stores — one of their partner channels — and the Target site has half the number of external calls. This is notable because Target has one of the most sophisticated digital teams in the biz with advanced data harvesting.

What I’m trying to say is that there is no reason for all of these external calls. It’s just not necessary and this would be the first place to look to speed things up.

Other big performance-enhancing areas are to enable compression, leverage browser caching so that returning customers have a better experience, defer TONS of JavaScript to later in the process so that users have a better experience and to not see interstitials and a few other things. Seriously … there are more than 30 JavaScript processes that can be pushed on down the road.

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