CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2042

10-Minute Teardowns of KylieCosmetics.com on Shopify

November 03, 2020

Hello -

If you read this email each week — and why wouldn’t you? — then you know that last week we did a live version of these 10-minute Teardowns for Wiremo’s online ECOM Event. Well, they only had us scheduled for 30 minutes, but they held us over for a full hour. And we had lots of great follow-up questions too. It was great.

And during the presentation we promised that in this week’s newsletter we’d skewer one of the Holy Grail websites of Shopify — Kylie Cosmetics.

I know, I know … it’s a risky move. Daring to take a shot at the Kardashians can get you banned in California and beat up in New Jersey. But since I’m safely tucked away behind the great winter wall in Michigan, let’s get to work.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: KylieCosmetics.com

Company Profile

No matter what you think of how Kylie Jenner got her start, you've got to give the girl credit. She parlayed her famous … um, “name” and face into a global billion-dollar brand. And she has branched out into a new skincare venture called

. A hefty portion of all those sales is purchased online through her Shopify websites, making her a top 60 Shopify Plus site and a top 22k website worldwide. This girl got game.

And she's obviously very fond of the color pink.

The Good Stuff

I expected page speed to be a problem, especially with all the … um “attractive” photos of Kylie posing for the camera. But I was really impressed. As you’ve heard us preach, page speed is critical. But it’s the stuff customers see and engage with that matters. And KylieCosmetics gets all the images and visual stuff load in 2 seconds. The full-page score is bad, but all that long-loading stuff is invisible crap in the code. Seriously folks … this is impressive and they know their stuff.

The entire site is brilliantly on-brand. All the images feel similar and “in the family,” the colors are warm and inviting, even the fonts feel like they belong. Their designer is a pro.

The product pages are generally well laid-out and have good info “above-the-fold.” Without scrolling, customers can see social proof, payment options, urgency building, decent descriptions, and click the buy button. I do not see risk reversal, but their brand power might be carrying the load for them here.

The shopping cart pops out nicely from the right with upsells and a nice array of payment options. FYI, there is not a lot of custom development here. You can have those in your shopping cart too.

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.

  • Octane AI — Facebook Messenger Bot

  • Yotpo — Marketing platform

  • Cookiebot — Cookie consent

  • AfterPay — Installment payments

  • PayPal/ShopifyPay/AmazonPay/ApplePay — Express payments

  • DoubleClick — Retargeting ads

This may not be a complete list, but do you remember last week when we did a 10-minute Teardown of TommyJohn? Those guys had thirty apps and widgets. Kylie does many times more in business and they have seven. Think about that for a minute.

This doesn’t mean that they haven’t tried a TON of apps. But if they did, they removed them properly to keep the site running FAST and CLEAN.

Needs Improvement

As good as most of their work is, their image formatting is inconsistent and, at times, amateur. They think that they are being smart about it, but in reality, they are making some rookie errors like using PNGs when they should be using JPEGs and mis-sizing things.

That’s why the category and product pages load chunky and slower than the home page. Way too slow.

Well, they have Image ALT tags on most products, but not on all the images on the site. This is a real miss. So much good work here and they obviously have a team working on the site … why not maximize SEO and conform to ADA laws folks?

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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