CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2047

10-Minute Teardown of GymShark.com on Shopify

December 08, 2020

Hello -

I hope that this email finds you well and that you love our little weekly email trysts together so much that you have taken a few precious moments away from filling online orders to give it a read.

Thanks for being here, we love you too. :-)

This is our busy-butt time of the year. Every day feels like a rush from the time we get up until we go to sleep. It’s like an eCommerce workout routine … like running wind-sprints in retail … like bench-pressing customer service as we all carry our boxed shipments to the UPS guy for pickup.

Geeze … all that work makes me want to sit down and have a slice of pizza. But first, here’s this week’s 10-minute Shopify teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: GymShark.com

Company Profile

GymShark may be the most successful online purveyor of gym and work-out apparel for men and women on the internet. The company was founded in 2012 by Ben Francis selling nutrition supplements — Ben was just 20 years old at the time. Now he’s 28, hasn’t sold a vitamin in years, and the UK-based GymShark was just valued at $1.3 billion. He got there with a focus on influencer marketing and zero venture capital. It helps that their target audience and products are tailor-made for Instagram, right? Just a few months ago they took their first round of outside investment to grow internationally. They are the #14 in Shopify land and a top 10k site on the entire internet.

The Good Stuff

We love their Home page. They use a technique that we’ve talked about in a lot of our videos and such. The home page is not a single Hero image. It is a series of 4 Hero images. It’s like A-B-C-D testing in real time. All of them really do the EXACT same thing — getting folks to start shopping — but it doesn’t “feel” like they are all the exact same thing.

Note the navigation. See how clean it is? No junk, no distractions, the full focus is on products and buying stuff. That’s why folks are here, right?

Even this big, established brand understands the value of Express Payment options. They have ‘em, specifically the two most important ones. And I can tell that they display based upon geography — I’m seeing the ones they use in the US. And they have also deployed AfterPay to let customers make payments. These are helping conversions, especially in their target demo.

Apps They Deploy

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

  • Nosto — website personalization.

  • Pingdom RUM — real-time user monitoring.

  • ScarabResearch — personalized product recommendations.

  • DataDog — more tracking crap (see notes below)

  • DC Storm — even MORE tracking crap.

  • Amplitude — analytics.

  • NewRelic — application tracking (competes with DataDog, why have both?)

  • Digital Window — customer account management.

  • Google Conversion Tracking — speaks for itself, resistance is futile ... you will be assimilated.

  • Riskified — fraud detection and prevention.

  • Social Media Tracking Pixels — they have them all, seriously … ALL of them.

  • Rakuten — you’ve seen the ads, they bring customers and charge a lot.

  • MaxMind — geographic content.

  • AfterPay — customer purchase financing.

  • PayPal/Venmo/ApplePay — Express Payment options.

  • Klarna — mobile checkout assistant.

  • Boomerang — performance analytics from consumer’s POV.

  • DoubleChick — ad network.

This may not be a complete list. No wonder the site has speed issues.

Holy crap

… next they’ll be reaching through the screens to staple a barcode to the visitor’s forehead. I’ll bet they aren’t even using half of these tricky-tracking things anymore but just forgot to uninstall stuff properly.

Needs Improvement

Their tracking methods get in the way of navigation. Sometimes you have to click the “back” button 2 or 3 times in a row before it actually takes. This is caused by internal redirects used for planting tracking pixels and analytics. I get it, but there are more elegant ways to do this. If your customer wants to go back to the previous page, sometimes that’s a good thing so you shouldn’t make it hard.

They have a page speed problem. Especially the first load of the primary content above the fold. And it is totally NOT necessary to have that problem. They can have those first primary content pieces load super-fast AND have all of their glorious tracking and JavaScript too. They just gotta tweak it in the code to make it happen.

… I have some news for GymShark. Your DataDog integration is one of the things hosing up the page load in the code. I keep seeing that app integration locking out other stuff and slowing things down. You have been warned.

Reviewing this site in detail has made me feel bad about getting off my workout routine this last week. Dang it.

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