CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2111-A (Trimmed)

We're Taking a Call from RepublicWireless.com — Shopify Website Teardown

March 23, 2021

Hello -

These days, you know how to make $1 million business in the cell phone industry? Simple … start with $2 million.

You’ve got T-mobile/Sprint and ATT and Verizon and who knows who else selling service. All of them are multi-billion-dollar companies with gigantic reach and marketing budgets and Super Bowl ads. No one can compete with these big players, right?

But you know who has learned how to make >$48 million — per year — in the cell phone business? Republic Wireless, that’s who. A little company with less than 100 employees, founded by two guys with a Shopify website and a sense of humor.

And these guys just punched the dream-ticket. Dish Network just announce that they’re going to acquire Republic Wireless — for an undisclosed sum. You know what “undisclosed sum” means? It means “we’re hiding money in the Cayman Islands so shut the heck up about it.”

Obviously, Republic Wireless is about to get all corporatey and the employees will now have to start wearing suites and going to meetings with PowerPoint slides and learn buzzwords like “synergy” and how to “engage stakeholders” and “circle back” and other crap.

So, I say we take a hard look at how these guys made it big as a service business on Shopify before the VP of Ignorance with an Ivy-League MBA in Bullcrap gets his hands on them.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: RepublicWireless.com

Company Profile

Republic Wireless was founded inside another company – Bandwidth.com – in 2010. Cofounder Chris Chuang was an executive there with a crazy idea. He’d figured out how to make money on other carrier’s networks by using software to make cell phone “hybrid” devices — jumping between Wi-Fi and cell service to save money. Lots of folks to this now, but back then it was revolutionary. It’s called MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator).

Anyway … they did a BETA program and proved it worked, then spun it off as an independent company in 2016 with a new Shopify site. And now

they are pushing wheelbarrows of cash around the parking lot for funzies.

They sell almost exclusively through their website but have an active social media presence. In fact, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are their most important client acquisition channels. They have also figured out how to use and abuse Amazon in ways that makes Jeff Bezos wish he’d have thought of it first. And they have, quite frankly, done a brilliant job at Content marketing.

They are ranked #145 in the Shopify galaxy and ranked #37k among US websites.

The Shopify Theme They Use

All the scanning tools say that this is a custom theme. But sometimes they had regular premium themes as custom ones. We’re way too smart to be fooled by their Sith mind tricks. So we dug into the code … looked under the hood … gave it a test drive … kicked the tires. And we’ve determined that this is a custom theme. Dang those Sith Lords!

Normally I criticize spending so much when there are perfectly capable themes available. But looking in the code I can see why they did it in this case … speed. I’ll mention this later, but these guys are smart and are using the Google bots fancy algorithm to beat the crap out of the big-boy sites. More on that in a moment.

The Good Stuff

Speed … speed, speed, speed.

And not “just” speed. Speed in all the right places. Google’s search algorithm changes in May of this year and something called “Core Web Vitals” start affecting search rankings. All that money they spent on custom development is tailored for 2 things: user experience and to trick Google into raising their rankings. In fact, the Core Web Vitals of the RepublicWireless.com site kick the live’in apps of T-mobile, ATT, and the rest. It is impressive.

Intelligent Content Marketing.

Even though the big cellular carriers have more market share, most visits, and marketing dominance, Republic Wireless beats the big guys in key orphan search terms. Again … I am impressed.

The Product Pages.

We preach this every single day. Product pages should have everything a customer “needs” to make their buying decision above the fold (seen without scrolling). Mission accomplished.

Needs Improvement

The Checkout Process.

It’s a bit clunky. I understand that for cell service you might need a bit more info than when you’re buying a hoodie. But adding Express Payment Options that auto-filled most of that info for me would be great.

That’s kind of it. The site is so clean and on-point that it’s hard to throw stones.

Apps They Deploy

We ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying. Get a load of this list:

  • Bazaarvoice — Feedback forms and surveys.

  • Pingdom RUM — Application Performance.

  • Klaviyo — eCommerce marketing and automation.

  • MailMunch — Email marketing.

  • Quantcast — Mobile Audience Analytics.

  • UpSellit — Cart abandonment.

  • ShareThis — Social sharing.

  • Affirm — Monthly payments.

  • DoubleClick — Ad network.

This may not be a complete list. But considering how much volume they do this is a nice, tight list that does not slow their site down.

Marketing Stuff They Do

Facebook Ads

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

Sponsored

Want a Shopify website that rings the bell? 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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