CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2105

Killing Time with VinceroWatches.com | 10-Minute Shopify Teardown

February 02, 2021

Hello -

If someone walked up to you and asked what time it was, would you look at your wrist or your phone?

I assumed that no one bought watches anymore, but it turns out that this is just not true. Until 2020 — a bad year for most businesses — the wristwatch business was showing consistent year-over-year growth. In fact, in 2019 they sold nearly $72 billion of the wrist candy. Best year ever.

And before you had social media-driven stocks (this week has been crazy), you had crowdfunding. That’s where normal folks invest their extra cash is startup companies so that they don’t have to go begging to the banks. It takes the middlemen out of it and mixes in a little democratic capitalism. And it seems to be working. The total value of crowdfunded projects worldwide is expected to top $1 trillion for the first time this year.

Speaking of all that, our teardown target for this week used crowdfunding to launch their watch brand on Shopify. That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: VinceroWatches.com

Company Profile

Vincero means “I win” in Italian. It’s also the crescendo line in the famous aria “Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s opera “Turandot.”

. The cat nails it.

I remember when Vincero Watches launched their crowdfunding campaign in 2014 on

. They raised just over $132k and started making timepieces. Business has ramped up fast. They are still privately held, so info is harder to get. But they now do ~30% of their sales volume internationally and UK revenue was up 120% last year. They pursue an aggressive D2C strategy with their #186 Shopify site,

, and social media campaigns.

The Theme They Use

Their theme is really clean. Our analytics indicate that it’s the

. I think it works well for them and it is nicely responsive on mobile devices.

The Good Stuff

Love the navigation. That main menu is super-clean and to the point.

Again … clean sells. Every page is crisp and clean. Nothing to distract from the products and what folks are supposed to do when they get here.

Good deployment of the shopping cart and Express Payment options.

Needs Improvement

You’d think that a company that … oh, I don’t know … MAKES TIMEPIECES would pay a bit more attention to how fast things load. The Home page has — are you sitting down? — nearly 500 external calls, is 11.5 MB in size, and takes 8.4 seconds to wrap things up.

If you go to the website, you might notice that there is a bit of delay for the Hero image to load and that it jumps a bit when it does. That’s because the Hero image is formatted poorly to optimize speed and quality. It’s one of the reasons that their page speed score is in the toilet.

Note to Vincero:

You desperately need a consultation on image formatting and fixing page speed. Please … let us help you!

Classic Error! I ran through a test purchase and can see that they are using QuadPay as an installment payment option. This is fine! BUT! In the code they still have AfterPay installed. See the problem? I suspect the same issue exists with all of those marketing tracking apps. They really need to clean house.

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/ShopPay — Express Payment options.

  • HotJar — website heatmaps and behavior analytics.

  • Klaviyo — eCommerce marketing and automation.

  • Wicked Reports — Marketing attribution.

  • Attentive — Mobile messaging.

  • GRIN — Influencer marketing.

  • Voltn — Customer Acquisition.

  • Swell Rewards — Customer loyalty programs.

  • LittleData — Google Analytics Toolbox.

  • Attentive — text messages

  • Foursixty — Shoppable Instagram.

  • Smooch — Visitor messaging.

  • Yotpo — Marketing platform

  • Ipify — IP locator for visitor tracking and analytics.

  • AfterPay — Installment payments.

  • QuadPay — Installment payments.

  • TrackJS — JavaScript (code) error tracking.

  • Modernizr — Browser detection.

  • Yepnope — Conditional resource loader (code thing).

  • Refersion — Affiliate marketing.

  • DoubleClick — Ad platform.

  • SnowPlow — Code event tracker.

This may not be a complete list.

Marketing Stuff They Do

Vincero Watches is pushing hard on social media. I looked through a lot of the ads and they have the right idea — they run several versions of every ad with different text and photos. As successful as they are, they know that testing is key.

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

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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