CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2044

10-Minute Teardown of AfterShokz.com on Shopify

November 17, 2020

Hello - 

I write these things on Monday evenings so the info is fresh when it throws down on Tuesday morning in your inbox. And as I wrote this week’s text, all of a sudden I heard a sound coming in the distance. Like the low rumble of thunder from a distant storm. And then, with a sudden flash, the thunder clapped overhead and I heard a voice come out of the storm.

And the voice said …

“BlackFriday/CyberMonday is less than two weeks away! Tell the people that they may know and understand!”

Crazy, right? Turns out that this Ghost of eCommerce Future sounds like a combination of Liam Neeson and James Earl Jones, so you better pay attention and get your site together.

Speaking of hearing things, let’s move on to this week’s 10-minute teardown target.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: AfterShokz.com

Company Profile

Remember a few years ago when Beats By Dre changed the world of headphones? They revitalized the mid-market quality headphone market in the Hip Hop world and added a billion dollars to Dr. Dre’s net worth when he sold the company to Apple. Well, AfterShokz is aiming to be the Beats of the sports and athletic market. And these guys are killing it!

They are a top 200 Shopify site and a top 47k website on the entire internet. They are full multi-channel with their eCommerce site, retail network, wholesale portal, Amazon storefront, 

The Good Stuff

Love the Home page layout. Clean, to the point, nothing to get in the way of moving on to the buying experience.

The subscription offer is solid — “win a free set of headphones” — but you require both email AND cell phone number. I have to think that this is impacting subscribes. But maybe it works for you.

The cart experience is pretty good and you do use Express Payment options which is good for conversions.

Good, disciplined content creation program. I don’t have time to test, but I hope that you’ve got your email campaigns set up for the holidays

I was just about to say, “I love your product pages” because you follow out “above the fold” recommendations. But then … the product images never loaded in Safari. I got them to load in Chrome. So, for layout you get a win, but if you don’t fix the image loads you are going to be crying the blues in a few weeks. And just in case you are reading this, I am looking at the OPENCOMM page:

OK … holy crap, the gloves come off now. I’m jumping down to the stuff that needs to be fixed because this site has problems.

Apps They Deploy

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

  • Solvvy — Automated customer service app.

  • FullStory — Customer experience tracking.

  • GRIN — Influencer marketing software.

  • Klaviyo — eCommerce marketing and automation.

  • Attentive — Mobile messaging.

  • AfterPay — Financing payment option

  • MaxMind — Geographic lookups.

This may not be a complete list. 

Needs Improvement

Guys, you’ve GOT to fix those product pages. Not only do you have the image loading problems I mentioned up top, but the images are terribly misformatted and mis-sized and it just is a poor reflection on your work.

OK … this is a weird one. If you have had us run any of our reports for you — Website Teardown, SEO Audit, Speed Report Analysis, etc. — then you know we hate broken external calls and unnecessary redirects. They just slow things down and create security holes. But there is one redirect that is absolutely mandatory — SSL. If a visitor tries to NOT access your site using encryption, then you need to force them to only access via a secure connection. These guys don’t. Heck, I don’t even know how you do that in Shopify. How do you even break a Shopify security feature like that? This is website 101 stuff guys … fix it!

Um, your Facebook page is down? Did someone make Mark Zucker-face angry?

Dang brothers … you got some page speed everything to fix y’all. Seriously. The organization in the code is all off, you got images loading late, broken external calls (security alert … AGAIN!), some weird 204 status calls, misformatted images, dogs and cats living together … mass hysteria! Forgive me, but this is just sloppy website maintenance. 

Marketing tip: If you market yourself as a brand for sports and athletics, you MIGHT want to use a sports image in the hero banner up top. Joe backpack there looks like he lost his lunch money to your target audience. Just saying.

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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