CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2035

10-Minute Teardowns of Relax the Back Store on Shopify

September 15, 2020

Hello -

Everyone’s looking for a marketing edge. When you’re in eCommerce, you really don’t care if it’s social media or a billboard on the highway. The only thing that really matters to us is that it works. Social media is still working, but the field is crowded and results are uneven. Some shops sell a ton and make a buck while others continue to struggle.

Some people have been hoping that the next big thing was going to be TikTok — the mini selfie music video dance thing of social media. Of course, no one had figured out HOW to market with it yet. But it was definitely looking like it was something, even if we didn’t quite know “what” that something was.

Anyway … TikTok is owned by a company called ByteDance and ByteDance is based in China (along with their servers). And big chief wonkety wonks say that the TikTok app harvests info on users and … ahem, “shares” it with the Chinese government. So, the US Government is forcing a sale of US-based TikTok to a US company.

but analysts are scratching their heads.

I guess what I’m saying is don’t post that branding video of your sick disco moves just yet. Stay tuned and we’ll see if TikTok survives in the US.

Here is this week’s teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: Relax the Back Store

Company Profile

Relax the Back Store was started in 1984 and started franchising in 1989. They have grown to hundreds of physical locations across the United States and have one of the top 500 Shopify sites. Their website is also in the top 75k of all websites on the internet. They sell exactly what their name implies — therapeutic and ergonomic furniture, accessories, and exercise equipment.

The Good Stuff

Relax the Back Store has a major commitment to content marketing. Their main menu has two major sections: Shop & Pain Relief Center. “Shop” is clear enough and opens up a mega-menu of products. “Pain Relief Center” is another mega-menu of articles that are helpful, completely on-brand, and amazing SEO gold mines. They also have an active social media profile, blog, and a “wellness survey.” This is a major investment that will bear fruits over the long term.

The home page is laid out clean and drives the customer into the sales funnel right away. The email subscription pop-up is not annoying and is timed to let the user breathe on the site for a bit before appearing.

Wow … this is impressive. The product images are PERFECTLY formatted to balance quality and speed AND they deploy smart and compliant ALT tags. It’s like we did it for them. The images I sampled for this email blast meet all of our best practices. It’s beautiful.

Great deployment of instant checkout and payment gateways. These guys have the correct attitude — when a customer wants to buy, they let them buy any way the customer wants to. That’s smart.

Apps They Deploy

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

  • Bold Commerce — eCommerce subscriptions.

  • NewRelic — real-time website monitoring.

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

  • AfterShip — shipment tracking.

  • ShopifyPay/PayPal/ApplePay/Venmo/GooglePay — payment gateways.

  • AdRoll & DoubleClick — retargeting ads.

  • ZenDesk — customer support.

This may not be a complete list.

Needs Improvement

The automated page speed tools suggest that this site needs a lot of help. But as you know, automated reports just tell the experts where to look. The truth is that the site visually loads a tad slow, so the customer experience is not bad.

That said, they have WAY too many external service calls (nearly double best practices) and some of those external calls are broken. We want to be kind, but with a site of this scale and importance there really is no excuse for it. Not only do broken and idle API calls slow the site down unnecessarily, but they can be a security risk as well because they are not being maintained for updates.

Sponsored

If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.

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