CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2104

Stepping Out with TonSnyder.com | 10-Minute Shopify Teardown

January 26, 2021

Hello -

It’s the third full week of 2021 already. I remember that it seemed like 2020 would never end and then all of a sudden, it’s just gone and the days of the following year are already ticking by. If you want to think of it another way, in just ten more days a full 10% of the year will already be behind you.

Wasting time is soooooo out of fashion.

Speaking of fashion … Let’s do get to work.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: ToddSnyder.com

Company Profile

Tom Snyder got game. He was a men’s fashion prodigy from Ames, Iowa (of all places). He moved to New York to work for Ralph Lauren designed outerwear. Then he worked for a long and prestigious string of retailers and fashion houses before launching his own design line in 2011 — inspired by Saville Row craftsmanship and military and New York style. American Eagle Outfitters acquired the brand in 2015. Their eCommerce website is #170 on Shopify’s list and they are a top 42k site on the internet overall and have 52k followers on Facebook.

The Good Stuff

The site is fairly crisp and on-brand. Take a good look at the navigation menu … no wasted space for “Home” or “About Us.” The site gets right down to work to let visitors navigate to the stuff they want to buy because that’s why the website exists.

I ran a few page speed tests and — aside from a little slowness loading those hero/header images — the site loads well for user experience even though the overall score is a bit low. And those hero images that are running a bit slow … it’s because they are not optimized. Give them 5-minutes worth of tweaking to meet our Best Practices recommendations and they would load like rockets.

I sampled several product images and they have smart, logical ALT tags. Halleluiah.

We really like the deployment of Express Payment option. They obviously prefer PayPal, but they had ApplePay and AmazonPay available during the checkout process. Remember … when someone wants to give you money, don’t quibble with how they want to do that and make it as easy as possible.

Needs Improvement

Speaking of product images, I sample several of them and they are certainly not optimized for a balance of speed and quality. You could shave nearly 50% off of the load size and get better quality to boot.

OK… this is not technically a Shopify thing, but they are selling $70 cashmere and wool NY Yankees baseball caps, and there is just something wrong about that. But, if they are selling a lot of $70 baseball caps, then they are doing something oh so right from an eCommerce point of view. I am conflicted.

On the Home page in the features area, it is a little unclear what you are supposed to do. When you mouse-over the images it displays text, but even that is a bit hard to read.

In desktop view the text is a bit small. But it rescales nicely in mobile view..

Apps They Deploy

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

  • ApplePay/PayPal/AmazonPay — Express Payment options.

  • HotJar — website heatmaps and behavior analytics.

  • Klaviyo — eCommerce marketing and automation.

  • Nosto — website personalization.

  • Segment — Customer Data Analytics (serious micro-targeting).

  • SwellRewards — loyalty and referral program.

  • JustUno — Social marketing.

  • SEO Manager — the name says it all.

  • Vimeo — Streaming video player.

  • DoubeClick — Retargeting ad marketplace.

This may not be a complete list.

Marketing Stuff They Do

They are currently running three ad groups on Facebook and Instagram. But each ad group has subtle variations of image and text … very subtle. They are testing to see which version gets the most info. This is a GOOD thing, and it’s something that all of us can do.

Below is a sampling of their 3 most recent Facebook ads.

Sponsored

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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