CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2043

10-Minute Teardown of ColorPop.com — #1 on Shopify

November 10, 2020

Hello -

You know what? I’m feeling frisky today. Let’s you and I get into some trouble together, shall we?

It’s no secret that tons of makeup and hair brands have made the choice to use the Shopify platform. Most of them got their start here. Heck, last week we tackled the Holy Grail of Kylie Cosmetics and found that although Kylie Jenner’s eyebrows might be perfect, her website isn’t [gasp!].

Sweet and sexy Kylie is hot, but she is far from the hottest … at least when we’re talking about the Shopify platform. In the Shopify universe, Kylie is #56.

Shopify has grown to host more than a million of us eCommerce merchants as we pursue our dreams through the magic of the internet. And the #1 site in Shopify-land is another cosmetics brand.

Do we dare to take a look? Do we tempt the gods of Shopify? Do we don our Guy Fawkes masks and storm the castle of eCommerce greatness?

Dang straight we do!

Here’s this week’s teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: ColourPop.com

Company Profile

As I said, ColorPop is THE most visited site in the Shopify ecosystem — they are #1. I hear that Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify) personally delivers hot lattes to the executive conference room of ColorPop every other Wednesday … along with a pleasant tray of French pastries and a fine shrubbery. ColorPop is also the 2787

most visited site on the entire internet. Trust me on this one … that is some high-altitude eCommerce right there.

They started as the online subsidiary of Seed Beauty in Oxnard, CA. But the online channel soon became the core of the business. Just six years later, they are an eCommerce juggernaut.

The Good Stuff

These guys know their audience. It’s really impressive. They have positioned themselves as the glamour brand for the common woman-person-pronoun-of-your-choice. It’s all about the fun and value.

I love their subscription form. It appeared at the bottom of the screen and did not interrupt the site. But it also was really noticeable. And it made a solid offer to tempt me. And I would have signed up but they do not carry my shade of eye shadow — Titanium Testosterone.

Remember, they are a value brand. They lead with the AfterPay app on the home page! Never seen that before, ever. But when your customers are cash-strapped, it shows that they understand the challenges of their target market.

Love the product pages. Everything a customer needs to make a decision is above-the-fold. Click, click, click.

Dang … the images are formatted really well for speed. They could be tweaked just a notch to balance quality and speed on all devices, but they’re darn close to perfect.

The shopping cart is well-deployed and has a great “free shipping progress bar” that I am going to recommend to others going forward. Really impressive and clean.

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.

  • DynamicYield — conversion optimization.

  • Yotpo — marketing platform.

  • Refersion — affiliate marketing.

  • Impact — paid marketing/ad platform.

This may not be a complete list.

But remember last week when I commented at how few apps Kylie Cosmetics had? Well, these guys have even fewer. And remember when I commented two weeks ago about how many apps TommyJohn had? Well, these two cosmetics brands a FAR more successful. This proves that just adding another app is NEVER the solution folks.

Needs Improvement

Nobody’s perfect. Case in point, the ALT tags are NOT properly SEO’d and they are NOT ADA compliant.

99% of this site loads like I want it to. That means that the stuff that impacts customers loads in under 2 seconds, even though all the code-geek tracking stuff takes a lot longer … EXCEPT! As I was reviewing their site, they were running a promo top hero image GIF that toggles between three states to look like it shimmers. This thing is a page slowness beast. That image alone is 1.7MB of wasted time. It’s the first thing customers see, but it loads way down in the code AND should not be that large. And there are a couple of other images that load low and slow for completely unknown reasons.

I’ve isolated a link to just that hero image so

.

There are about six redirects, cancels, and reflux errors in the code. Come on guys … this stuff is easy to clean up. And by the way, NO ONE needs that many external calls.

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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