CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2102

10-Minute Teardown of SteveMadden.com on Shopify +BONUS Content

January 12, 2021

Hello - 

My feet hurt and it’s your fault.

I’ve been pacing up and down the floor all day trying to figure out which top Shopify website to pick on … er, I mean to give you a great 10-minute teardown on for this week’s newsletter. Consistently delivering valuable and interesting content like this ain’t no cakewalk, you know. I think I’ve come with something that will work but now my feet hurt and I’m hungry — and that’s just not a good combination. Maybe I just need a new pair of shoes.

Speaking of new shoes, let’s take a look at this week’s target website.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: SteveMadden.com

Company Profile

Steve Madden makes shoes. They make a LOT of shoes. And not the cheap ones. Did you know that Steve Madden is a public company? Their ticker symbol on the stock exchange is “SHOO” … hilarious, right? Anyway, not only do they sell a lot of shoes, they sell them everywhere: inside big department stores, in specialty shoe retailers, in their own chain of retail locations, online at SteveMadden.com, on Amazon, they are social media masters … no wonder they sold (hang on to your internet) nearly $1.8 BILLION worth of fashion stuff last year. They are the 9

most popular website on the Shopify ecosystem and a top 8k site on the entire internet.

The Good Stuff

Website speed — the important user experience stuff — is pretty good. They load up the images and walk right up to the line, but do not cross it. They do have too many external calls and a few mis-formatted images that are unnecessary, however.

The website is on-brand like crazy. Everything about it screams spoiled city-slickers in New York during fashion week. But that’s their style and brand, so I say bravo.

Site navigation is perfect. No link is wasted and it drives customers to the purchase cycle.

Did I mention that the shoes are expensive? They are, and so Stevemadden.com deploys BOT AfterPay and the installment option in ShopPay. I’ll bet the young hipsters use the heck out of those services.

Needs Improvement

Well … their SEO sucks. I mean it REALLY sucks. They are darned near doing everything wrong … descriptions, titles, ALT tags … all suck. If you think that doesn’t matter when you are a multi-billion dollar brand, think again. I tested several searches and Macy’s, Amazon, DSW, Zappos, and others all beat them unless the brand name is included — which is, as you should know, a navigational search. This means that their website is having a hard time attracting new customers to the brand. That had to hurt them in 2020.

When did “vinyl” become “vegan leather?” seriously … I wonder if the marketing team is serious or if that is an inside joke that everyone laughs about over cocktails on Friday night. Would you wear “vegan leather” shoes? I always thought it was funny when they called fake leather “Naugahyde.” Remember that? I guess “vegan leather” is the new “Naugahyde,” but it’s still funny.

There is some dirty code in the site, but it’s not too bad. Maybe they’ll get to fixing it now that the holiday season is over.

Apps They Deploy

We ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying. Let’s take a look:

  • ApplePay/PayPal — Express Payment options.

  • ShopPay/AfterPay — installment payment apps.

  • RapLeaf — marketing data analytics.

  • HotJar — website heatmaps and behavior analytics.

  • Klaviyo — eCommerce marketing and automation.

  • LiveRamp — marketing client identification.

  • Attentive — text messaging.

  • Gatsby — Influencer marketing.

  • Swell Rewards — customer loyalty programs.

  • Riskified — fraud detection and prevention.

  • Snowplow — Open-source analytics.

  • LivePerson — Chat app.

  • Smooch — Website visitor messaging.

  • Yotpo — eCommerce marketing and reviews.

  • Akamai — Content Delivery Network (CDN).

  • Cloudflare — Another CDN?

  • Refersion — Affiliate marketing.

 This may not be a complete list.

Marketing Stuff They Do

We’re always telling our Shopify customers to run multiple ads with relatively small budgets and then watch for performance to weed out the bad and double down on the good … then do it all over again. The big huge mega brand SteveMadden.com does this to the extreme. On January 7

alone they launched 17 different ads on Facebook and Instagram. Then they launched 8 more on January 8

. They are weeding through them now. There are nearly 30 ads running concurrently right now.

You could do something similar … make five or ten ads and just assign $5 per ad for two weeks to see which ones works and which ones don’t.

Below is a sampling of their 3 most recent Facebook ads that ran during the Christmas buying season.

Sponsored

If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done. 

.

Share the Love

Sharing is good, and it's time for you to share your favorite Shopify newsletter. How about you forward this email to a worthy entrepreneur right now – just 

 and share the love.

And if you're lucky enough to have a friend who shared this awesome email with you, Welcome! 

 for yourself. You’ll be glad that you did.