CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2108

Counting the Benjamins with RidgeWallet.com — 10-Minute Shopify Teardown +BONUS Content

February 23, 2021

Hello -

Did you hear that Amazon chief muckety-muck Jeff Bezos fell out an airplane? Don’t worry, he’s fine. He fell on his wallet.

If you scaped all $182 billion of his fortune into a single stack, it would go back and forth to the moon 7 times. So, my question is how much does he carry around in his wallet? Or does he have a guy walking behind him with a wheelbarrow full of it … you know, for odds and ends?

I’m asking because the target of this week’s Shopify 10-minute teardown sells wallets made of exotic stuff like titanium and carbon fiber and aircraft-grade aluminum. Do you think Jeff Bezos has a titanium wallet?

I guess it doesn’t matter … here’s this week’s Shopify 10-minute teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: RidgeWallet.com

Company Profile

I came across RidgeWallet because obviously I got in Facebook’s data-feed somehow. There I was, doom-scrolling Facebook looking for trolls and I kept seeing ad after ad for RidgeWallet. So, they got me. I clicked and turns out they are a big Shopify store. So, let’s you and I dig in and see how they’re doing.

The products look pretty slick and modern. They sell on their site, have an extensive presence on Amazon, and sell on Facebook/Instagram. More on this at the bottom of this email. They also appear to have an extensive reseller channel. They are a top 100 Shopify store and a top 30k website on the internet, so I guess they’re selling a butt-load of wallets.

The Theme They Use

They are using a custom theme … party-poopers. 99% of the time there's no need for a custom theme but folks still make them.

The Good Stuff

They invented a new kind of wallet and it works and looks sharp. They’re the kind of wallets you carry in a pocket and the materials are pretty manly. The Damascus Steel one sure is pretty. Anyway, the layouts are clean and efficient and the photography is good.

On the product pages it looks like they’ve been reading our content here at TaskHusky. The images are crisp, there are trust badges, and there's good info above-the-fold so customers can make a buying decision without scrolling.

I really like the shopping cart implementation once a purchase selection is made. The "added to cart" notification slips out from the right seamlessly and looks really sharp. Builds confidence.

The checkout page is great too with a proper layout and a good selection of Express Payment options.

Needs Improvement

You know what? Their page speed would actually be not bad … if they didn’t have 75 failed image loads on the home page ... and if their home page header image didn’t scale to 46” across when downloaded. I am Sooooooooo not making this up, people. There’s a bunch of other stuff too. I’m not sure where they’re spending all that cash they’re making selling wallets because they’re certainly not spending it on their website.

As nice as the product pages are they have done a poor job of SEO. The product names are not optimized, they have no headings 1 or 2 in the descriptions, the images have sucky ALT tags … basically, they’re doing just about everything wrong from an SEO perspective. And that’s why their competition is creeping up no them in the search results (yes, I checked). They are losing business that they do not have to lose because they’re not paying attention.

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.

  • Klaviyo — eCommerce marketing and automation.

  • Tatari — TV and Streaming Video Advertising.

  • Snowplow — Open-source analytics.

  • Digital Window — Affiliate marketing.

  • ByteDance — They are doing the TikTok stuff.

  • Foursixty — Instagram commerce.

  • TalkTable — Referral programs.

  • JustUno — Social media marketing.

  • BackInStock — Inventory notifications.

  • Okendo — Customer Reviews.

  • ShopPay/ApplePay/PayPal/GooglePay — Express payment options.

  • Unbounce — Retargeting ads.

  • DoubleClick — Ad network.

  • Taboola — Personalized recommendations.

This may not be a complete list.

Marketing Stuff They Do

RidgeWallet advertises extensively on social media and even on TV.

Below is a sampling of their 3 most recent Facebook ads, a screenshot of their Amazon store, and a link to their TV commercials if you want to have a look.

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

or clicking on the image below.

RidgeWallet has a large presence on Amazon and a dedicated storefront. Here's what it looks like.

Sponsored

What's in your website? 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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