CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2039

10-Minute Teardown of ShadyRays.com on Shopify

October 13, 2020

Hello - 

So, today was Amazon Prime Day. It’s the contrived holiday of online largess for the eCommerce giant. My question is, “Do you care?” Let me explain.

For a lot of Shopify merchants,

Amazon is on the frenemies list

. They use the Shopify-Amazon integration to use Amazon as a channel or even a second online store, paying healthy fees to them for the privilege. But they also know that if they are really successful, Jeff Bezos will tilt the game and compete with them head-to-head.

That means that some of our customers benefit directly from Amazon. But there are also some reports that there is a decent spill-over effect of customers shopping more online in general today and an uptick in purchases from Amazon vendors even if they do not participate directly in Prime Day.

My question for our Shopify community is how Amazon Prime Day affects your business. Reply to this email and let me know.

Let’s take a look at this week’s 10-minute teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: ShadyRays.com

Company Profile

ShadyRays sells value-priced, polarized sunglasses. They are based in Shelby County, Kentucky, where their home office employs 22 people. But they recently announced plans to open a second facility and more than double the size of their operation, but COVID may have delayed those plans a bit.  They sell on Amazon (small footprint) and have an extensive social media effort and a TV advertising campaign to drive website traffic to their Shopify site. They are a top 100k website worldwide and a top 70k site for Shopify Plus.

The Good Stuff

I love their subscription sign-up offer. Clean, on-point, and effective with a fun offer to suck me in. Check it out for yourself.

The pages are good-looking and on-brand. They have tons of user engagement with social media images provided by their customers and this is a very effective thing in lifestyle/fashion categories.

Product pages are clean and full of valuable content “above the fold.” The call to action is clear and up front. Once a pair of glasses is selected, an upsell for a case comes along in a seamless shift that I think works really well.

The do not quibble about pennies and prodive all the top payment methods to remove all friction in the sale. 

Apps They Deploy

We ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying.

Get a load of this list:

  • Klaviyo — eCommerce marketing and automation.

  • SwellRewards — loyalty programs

  • Bold Commerce — product versioning/options app, and product upsell app

  • RapLeaf — marketing data analytics

  • LiveRamp — marketing client identification

  • Secomapp — conversion optimization

  • Steelhouse — retargeting 

  • Mixpanel — customer experience optimization

  • NeatAB — A/B testing

  • Yottaa — website optimization

  • Attentive — text messaging

  • Claritas — segment targeting

  • Pushnami — push notifications

  • JustUno — social media marketing

  • Yotpo — eCommerce marketing

  • Refersion — affiliate marketing

  • DoubleClick — retargeting network

  • AdRoll — retargeting

  • GoogleRemarketing — retargeting

  • TripleLift — advertising network

  • Sojern — digital marketing for the travel industry (?)

  • AfterPay — customer payment plan app

  • AmazonPay/ShopifyPay/ApplePay/GooglePay/PayPal — express payment platforms (good job!)

  • TheTradDesk — media buying network

This is NOT a complete list ...

this is a PROBLEM

. See the next section.

Needs Improvement

OK … at first I was going to give these guys a pass on the quality of their code. But this is just crazy. These guys do a ton of business online. They HAVE to have a team of folks who run their site. But they also have more than 400 external calls, and I counted fifteen that are broken, failed, redirected, canceled, and a few other error codes that I have no idea what they do. And they have six font calls — this is user impact stuff — that takes more than 6.5 seconds to load. AND I am seeing old Klavio code that doesn’t work anymore and a bunch of API external calls that likely are duplicated or do nothing.

Anyway … They REALLY need to clean this stuff up, and I’m being kind here.

THIS IS IMPORTANT — do not let this happen to you.

Did you see ALL THOSE FREAK’IN apps? Here’s what’s happening in my opinion. ShadyRays has experimented with a whole bunch of marketing and analytics apps over time. There’s no harm in that … UNLESS you never properly uninstall all those test apps. Then you end up with what we have here — your website calling out to more than 400 external servers that no one really knows how or why. 

This is not just a page stability and slowness thing. This is a security issue.

One more critique … the image ALT tags not only are not optimized for SEO, they are not ADA compliant. Trust me, this matters.

Sponsored

The holidays are coming! 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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