CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2037

Hello -

Happy Tuesday! I trust that you had a great week.

It still surprises me sometimes which eCommerce businesses are on the platform. When I sat down to write this email and started combing through all the amazing Shopify stores to pick this week’s target, I saw Blendtec.

Do you remember Blendtec? Thirteen years ago they were one of the first companies to really take off using viral video on YouTube with their “Will It Blend” series. Hilarious stuff! They basically showed how tough and powerful their blenders were by shoving all kinds of stuff into the spinning blades … rakes, chunks of wood, even iPhones. It was crazy and they sold a TON of blenders.

They’re still doing it.

and then read about the Blendtec website in this week’s 10-minute teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: Blendtec.com

Company Profile

Blendtec makes high-end blenders for both the commercial restaurant market and the home user. They’ve been around for a long time, but they exploded more than a decade ago on the success of a viral video campaign on YouTube. They are a top 400 Shopify site and a top 70 website worldwide. They are using Shopify Plus.

The Good Stuff

If you “just” looked at automatic page speed scores, you would say that this website sucks. In fact, it gets the lowest total scores possible. But the truth is that — with VERY few exceptions — these guys have optimized very well for the all-important user experience. What the customer sees and interacts with loads fast, and for conversions that’s what matters. There are a few things that they cannot do anything about … for example, YouTube videos only load so fast and YouTube is a prime advertising platform for them. But otherwise, the primary visual elements load in 2.35 seconds.

The website is beautiful and on-brand. Sometimes I look at a site and it does nothing for me. This site makes me want to buy a blender. They make pricey blenders, but I still want one. That means things are working … at least for my demographic.

Product pages are clean and fast. Could use more risk reversal and the text formatting needs to be tightened up, but they’re solid. Clicking the buy button zips you to the shopping cart without delay. It’s a beautiful shopping cart page too.

Apps They Deploy

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

• Klaviyo — eCommerce market and automation.

• HotJar — website heatmaps and behavior analytics. (see next item)

• LuckyOrange — website heatmaps and behavior analytics. (why do you need two?)

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

• DoubleClick — retargeting network.

This may not be a complete list.

Needs Improvement

The photos are fairly well optimized and they load in the proper order. But I have a few pet peeves, and one of them is using PNG images when you should use JPEG and vice-versa. There are a ton of PNG files that would be better quality and smaller in size if they were JPEGs … just saying.

There are four external calls in the code that just fail … completely broken. That’s just sloppy. It looks like one of the most common causes — an app or service that has been discontinued and wasn’t properly uninstalled. Eventually, stuff like this slows down the page, but it is a security risk from day 1.

Payment methods … they need more of them. The only express checkout option is AmazonPay. Hey, I get it. AmazonPay is convenient and nice, but Jeff Bezos is also the Devil. He could wake up tomorrow and decide to eat your business whole before his first cup of coffee in his favorite gold-plated coffee mug and then forget about you before he finishes a croissant that he had flown in from Paris. Adding at least PayPal and ApplePay insulates you a bit from the vagaries of billionaire behemoth bullying AND will incent a few more customers to buy.

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