CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2112

Rolling in the Sheets with BollAndBranch.com

March 30, 2021

Hello -

Did you have a good night's sleep last night? I did. The room was the perfect temperature … not too warm so you still need to cover up a bit. The high temp today will be a nearly perfect 66°f. That’s great stuff right there … feels like springtime.

Of course, I live in the Midwest, so naturally that can’t last. Sure enough, it’s going to drop well below freezing AGAIN by tomorrow night. In the spring, it seems like the entire state of Michigan is off its meds and acting all crazy. But no worries. In another month or so it will be tornado season and everything will be just fine.

Maybe I can just drag the laptop and a box of chicken nuggets into bed and stay under the covers for the next 2 days.

That reminds me, here’s this week’s Shopify teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: BollAndBranch.com

Company Profile

Boll And Branch are full of sheet … rather, they sell sheets. The sell a LOT of sheets. The company was founded in 2013 by Scott and Missy Tannen. They started selling sheet sets online and now sell a wide range of bedding with a bent toward organic, free trade, and a bunch of other stuff like that.

They are ranked #235 in the Shopify galaxy and ranked in the top 50,000 among US websites.

The Shopify Theme They Use

Some shops find it

comforter

to have a custom theme. We’re

down

with that. Maybe they think it

covers

things well enough. But most of the time

full-size

custom themes are a

sham

.

OK ... no more bad puns. It’s a custom theme.

The Good Stuff

The website design is softly styled, clean, and on-brand.

I ran through a trial purchase and teased their analytics all the way through the end but stopped just short of completing the purchase. I will now be retargeted and remarketed to forever (the things I do for you people). But the process and shopping cart experience was solid and there were good Express Checkout options that are likely helping them close deals.

The website navigation is clean and intuitive. The top menu gets right down to business. I had no trouble finding my way around and was always pointed towards a purchase.

They sell a “Waffle Bed Blanket.” I like Waffles.

Needs Improvement

This website is slow as sheet. It’s not often we see an average score of “F” across a selection of pages. With the new Web Core Vitals initiative by Google, this is going to start hurting them in a matter of weeks. And if they are not paying attention the sheet’s gonna get tucked.

When you are selling $200 luxury sheet sets and $2000 mattresses it seems like you should have an installment payments option like AfterPay or Affirm or similar. I wonder why they don’t? Seems like a no-brainer.

They need to work on the risk reversal. Social proof was easy to see, but quality guarantees and the ability to exchange/return … had to dig for them.

Apps They Deploy

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

  • Attentive — Personalized messaging.

  • Dynamic Yield — Automated conversion optimization.

  • Yottaa — User experience optimization.

  • FullStory — Customer experience analytics.

  • SteelHouse — Behavioral commerce and real-time offers.

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

  • Lucky Orange — Real-time user monitoring and interaction.

  • LittleData — Google analytics toolbox.

  • Snowplow — Open-source analytics.

  • Claritas — custom audience segments.

  • BackInStock — Inventory notifications.

  • Zopim — Online help.

  • Algolia — Search APIs.

  • Bugsnag — Code performance monitoring.

  • Yotpo — Social review widget.

  • Affirm — Installment payments (remember, this was NOT displayed!)

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

This may not be a complete list. But we can see that there are apps installed that are not currently being used on the site. That’s just bad site management and one of the reasons the site is so darn slow.

Marketing Stuff They Do

BollAndBranch advertises heavily. They are all over the radio and currently have 13 TV ad campaigns running as I write this. They also regularly advertise on social media, so let’s take a look at that.

Facebook Ads

They are currently running three ad groups on Facebook and Instagram. There is not a lot of variety or testing groups to the ads, so even though the ads have video and decent production values I think that they are kind of phoning it in. You can’t get complacent with these things.

But here are the three current ad groups.

Sponsored

Time to wake up your Shopify 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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