CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2107

It’s Frigg’in Cold & Stomping with AllBirds.com — 10-Minute Shopify Teardown +Stuff

February 16, 2021

Hello -

Do you know what the weather forecast is? I do. Go ahead … ask me about the weather. I dare you … I double-dog dare you.

It’s cold.

No … I’m not talking about cold as in “Make sure to wear your sweater, honey” kind of cold. No sir ... I’m in the Midwest. I’m talking about

“Don’t breathe air ‘cuz your lungs will freeze and you’ll die”

kind of cold.

Frostbite would be a heatwave. I just got a sympathy card from a penguin. “Room temperature” means a block of ice. Our resident Husky dog here at TaskHusky is looking at me like “You gotta be frigg’in kidding.” I can’t charge my cell phone because electrons have stopped moving.

But here I am, writing your email because I love you. Here’s this week’s Shopify 10-minute teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: AllBirds.com

Company Profile

AllBirds.com is killing it. They make shoes from a bunch of unique natural materials like sugarcane pulp, eucalyptus fiber, and ethically sourced wool. They have some cool commercials on TV and run regular ads on social media. Interestingly, I could not find a presence on Amazon. But if you search for them there Amazon will show you a bucketload of similar shoes. Seems like a sore subject to me.

They are a Top-10 Shopify store and a top 10k site on the entire interwebs and that’s pretty impressive stuff.

The Theme They Use

Just like last week, AllBirds is using a custom theme which is really strange since it looks like a standard premium theme. It’s like going into the car dealership and asking for a completely customer-built car that looks just like a Honda Accord. But it looks good.

The Good Stuff

The website looks really good. It is super-clean and loads fast in the important ways. The stuff folks “see” loads in about 1.5 seconds and then all the marketing and tracking crapload for the next 7 seconds.

The product pages are darned near perfect on both desktop and mobile views. I call special attention to the use of icon features images and options/versions implementation. They have a unique arrangement of well-optimized product images and perfectly executed short video clips.

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The shopping cart is strong and includes the deployment of four of the top Express Payment options.

Needs Improvement

The AllBirds.com site is filled with great products worn by attractive people having fun but there are no snowshoes so what good are they. Did I mention it’s cold?

It’s such a nice site that it’s hard to quibble. But there is some junk in the truck (bad code) that is slowing them down a bit. A few canceled calls, some unnecessary redirects, that kind of thing. Seems to me that these guys should have the resources to take care of business.

Apps They Deploy

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

  • HotJar — Website heatmaps and behavior analytics.

  • Simon Data — Marketing Platform.

  • Gladly— Customer service.

  • Yottaa — Page speed optimizer.

  • Iterable — UX optimization.

  • GRIN — Influencer marketing.

  • AppSalute — Marketing automation.

  • Branch — Visitor engagement.

  • DoublClick — Ad marketplace.

  • Bugsnag — Code performance monitoring.

  • AmazonPay/ShopifyPay/PayPal/ApplePay — Express payment options.

  • Modernizr — Browser optimization.

  • LiveIntent — Email advertising.

  • Taboola — Personalized recommendations.

This may not be a complete list. I can't feel my toes.

Marketing Stuff They Do

AllBirds advertises extensively on social media and on TV.

Below is a sampling of their 3 most recent Facebook ads that are running right now. They are doing it right — running several versions of each ad and letting the market decide what works.

As we said, AllBirds also does a lot of TV advertising. You can see a few of their current ads by

or clicking on the image below.

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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