CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2040

10-Minute Teardown of Zippo.com on Shopify

October 20, 2020

Hello -

This is cool ….

You know how we do these emails with “10-minute Teardowns” of top Shopify sites. Well, my team does REALLY detailed reports and website teardowns and recommendations for top Shopify websites all the time. So, the folks at Wiremo asked if one of my top team members could do one live for their upcoming ECOM Summit event.

Check it out. The event is on October 29

and we go on at 12:30 pm EDT / 9:30 am PDT.

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I’ve seen my team do live reviews like this before and when we’re on fire, you KNOW the session will be lit!

Speaking of lit fire, let’s take a look at this week’s 10-minute teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: Zippo.com

Company Profile

Zippo has defined the classic lighter for three generations. Even though cigarettes have fallen dramatically out of favor — for obvious reasons — the flip-lid click of Zippo keeps on going, starting campfires, igniting BBQ grills, and lighting up the smokes of millions of people all over the world. Some of their models are collectibles. They have a wide-ranging wholesale strategy (you can’t visit a truck stop without seeing their displays) and have a very nice website, rising to become a top 700 Shopify Plus store and a top 100k website by page rank.

The Good Stuff

These guys see the writing on the wall and know that they cannot rely solely on Amazon and social sales. They have a series of collector edition lighters that are only available on their website. This is a good move for them.

Got to share the love a bit … they do a decent job with image ALT tags. Not great, but better than most on product photos. And no doubt they are enjoying big SEO gains as a result.

Their product images a super-fast loading. It may sound funny, but I think that they are a bit over-optimized for speed. My team helps dozens of sites with this each month and they need a tad bit more quality to stand up to zoom functions on modern phone displays. But still, pretty good job.

The site design is clean and gets right to work. It says “you’re here to buy lighters so let’s get’er done!”

Apps They Deploy

We ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying. Get a load of this:

  • Klaviyo — eCommerce marketing and automation.

  • HotJar — website heatmaps and behavior analytics.

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

  • DoubleClick — retargeting network.

  • NS8 — fraud prevention.

This is likely NOT a complete list.

Needs Improvement

The only Express Checkout option they have is ApplePay. Sure, ApplePay is great. But what they heck dudes? It’s a piece of cake to add PayPal and AmazonPay and ShopifyPay, isn’t it? Or even GooglePay? Don’t put all your eggs in one basket Mr. Zippo-man!

Zippo suffers from another one of my pet peeves …. dirty code. When we run our testing tools on the site we see more than 300 external calls! Holy Frijoles Batman! That’s triple best practices. And you know what … it just does NOT have to be that way. There are dozens of redirects and several canceled or failed calls. So this is just a failure to maintain things. And remember, this is not “just” a page speed issue, it’s a security issue too. And there are dozens and dozens of calls to “a.amazon.adsystem” that seem unnecessary. Everything is fixable and they should because all this crap destroys your page scores. So now check out the next items.

The main menu at the top is glitchy. Had to let it dropdown items reload six or seven times before it would let me mouse-over the sub-categories. In my opinion, this is a direct result of the messy code mentioned above. If they do not fix things, more of this kind of stuff will appear.

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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