CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2048

10-Minute Teardown of Rmattress.com on Shopify

December 16, 2020

Hello - 

Golly-Bob-Howdy, Christmas is just 10 days away! Wait … no … it’s only 9 days away. It’s only 9 days away because I was supposed to send this email out yesterday.  Like The Ghost of Christmas Past, this email is come’in at you a day late.

Why is this email arriving a day late, you ask?

Let’s not dwell on the past. All that’s just water under the bridge. So, in the spirit of giving that is the heart and soul of the holiday season we are going to just move along and think of puppies.

I will say that this holiday season is busy as heck and we are all running around doing the entrepreneurial thing while buying gifts and putting up the decorations. It’s enough to wear a guy out. But before we all lay down for a long winter’s nap, here’s this week’s 10-minute Shopify teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: Rmattress.com

Company Profile

As you would expect, RMattress sells mattresses, bed frames, bedding, and related accessories online. And they sell a lot of them. They sell established brands — as opposed to selling new brands with technology and/or product differentiation. Business has been good enough that they have even signed James Cordon of the Late Late Show as a spokesperson.

That’s got to cost a bit, eh? Who wouldn’t want to have a celebrity in their pocket?

Not only are they #44 on Shopify’s list of successful merchants, but they are a top 20k website on the entire internet — a level of success that many of us dream of.

The Good Stuff

The site is clean and no-nonsense. These days, brand name mattresses are a commodity and there are tons of competitors. In commodity markets, the brands are established and you don’t have to educate the customer base. Pricing is key and they focus on that. It seems to me that Rmattress.com understands that.

The visual page loads very fast. The page speed score is poor, but it is wrong. The automated speed scores NEVER tell the whole story, and the scores do not properly reflect the customer experience (which is all we should care about).

They do a decent job on SEO. Product descriptions and image ALT tags are in place.

This site is clean in the code. This successful, high-volume site has only 67 external calls on their home page. That is the cleanest “big site” I’ve seen ever.

Apps They Deploy

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

  • ShopifyPay/GooglePay/ApplePay — Express Payment options.

  • The Trade Desk — advertising marketplace.

This may not be a complete list. But holy mackerel folks …. almost ZERO apps! A multi-million-dollar Shopify site using almost no apps! Like I said … clean code and a laser focus on the basics.

Needs Improvement

Likely due to their current promotions, the Hero image rotator at the top scrolls through two images. The problem is that the two images are not the same size or scale. That causes the page to jump — pushing and pulling the lower content up and down. Customers hate that, Google hates that, page speed score tools hat that. So here’s an idea … don’t do that.

The top menu navigation … see how they have the word “Home” in front? EVERYONE knows that clicking the logo takes you home. Put Best Sellers first (or similar).

They’re getting their images from the manufacturers. That makes it hard to have standardized product images. I get it. But with a little effort you can make them display better with a good balance of speed and quality. And the images are hard to see. They need to display larger on desktop/laptop computers. They look OK on mobile, but you can take a little time and make it work well for both … and you should.

Some of these mattresses are expensive. They might benefit from a consumer payments app like AfterPay or similar.

Sponsored

There's no rest for the Shopify merchant, and your website should keep up. 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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