CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2046

10-Minute Teardown of TheFryeCompany.com on Shopify

December 01, 2020

Hello - 

This time of year it’s busy for everyone in the eCommerce world. Our customers are busy with holiday sales, and that means we’re busy helping them tweak the knobs and dials to get the website just right. But that also means we’ve been working all weekend.

So here I am on Monday working on the weekly email and I’ve missed lunch so I’m hungry. But I gotta finish the email first. So, I’m sifting through all the top-volume Shopify sites and I come across The Frye Company and I think, “Hey, this is perfect! I’ll get to see pictures of french-fries or chicken or maybe even those little jalapeño poppers that give me gas,” because, you know … I’m hungry.

Imagine my disappointment that all they sell is a bazillion dollars’ worth of high-end footwear. I mean, that’s great and all, but I’m still hungry enough to eat shoe leather. Which reminds me … here is this week’s 10-minute teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: TheFryeCompany.com

Company Profile

The Frye Company is one of those rare beasts — a retailer from the 1800s that has successfully changed with the times and now continues to rule their segment on the internet. There are VERY few companies that can make that claim. And … they sell lots of shoes … mostly boots. They are a 217

 most visited store on Shopify and a top 50k site on the internet.

The Good Stuff

The site navigation is great. Straight to the point. All the extra stuff not directly related to buying shoes is in the footer. Good job.

“Some” of the images are fairly well optimized for a balance of speed, quality, and consistency. Others are not. It’s like two completely different people did the work (see page slowness below).

The photography is beautiful, consistent, and on-brand.

Apps They Deploy

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

  • BorderFree — globalization platform.

  • Yottaa — website experience optimization.

  • Bazaarvoice — customer interaction.

  • HotJar — website heatmaps and behavior analytics. (see next item)

  • Nosto — website personalization.

  • Attentive — mobile messaging.

  • Back in Stock — customer inventory alert.

  • Searchanise — website search function.

  • DoubleChick — ad network.

  • The Trade Desk — online ad marketplace.

This may not be a complete list. 

Needs Improvement

Really people? No image ALT tags, again? I suppose you LIKE to lose SEO to Zappos then, right?

We are accustomed to having these hugely successful Shopify stores cheat a little on page speed. You know you can fudge the total load time a bit. BUT! You can only do that if the customer experience is perceived to be seamless. And in this case, it ain’t. The primary image area at the top takes more than 4 seconds to load and time to engagement is almost 5 seconds … and that’s just wrong (all easily fixable by the way). In this case, those hero images are messing up your speed.

Wow … I tried to walk through the checkout process and the shopping cart just crapped out on me. Nothing but a server error message. Oops. Tried three more times and the Checkout Button failed each time. Had to reroute through the cart, but then it still didn’t work. This is not good on Cyber Monday folks.

Someone in the tech department at The Frye Company is gonna get a talking to when marketing sees all the missed sales on Cyber Monday.

If the Shopping Cart or Checkout did work, I would want to see Express Checkout options like PayPal and ApplePay … I did not see them.

Sponsored

When it comes to fixing Shopify websites, we've got plenty of sole. 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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