CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2114

Rolling In The Deep with Adele on Shopify

April 13, 2021

Hello -

Geeze, last week’s email was super-popular. I totally did not know we had so many Lady Gaga fans in Shopify-land. And the success of that email inspired me.

So, to all the new subscribers, just let me say

Hello

. I’ve been waiting for

Someone Like You

.

All I Ask

is that you sit back, relax, and enjoy this week’s email where we’re

Turning Tables

on the biggest and most famous Shopify sites to see what they do right and what they do wrong.

Rumor Has It

you’ll find a few laughs mixed in with some solid inspiration to help achieve

Hometown Glory

in eCommerce.

That reminds me, here’s this week’s

Happy Selling,

Zachary

WAIT!Before we get to talking about Adele's Shopify store, I have an important request.We need to talk about mental health.Last year our friend and my golf partner Stephen unexpectedly took his life two weeks after our annual charity golf outing.Like many struggling with depression, they don’t tell anyone. Despite spending the entire day together laughing, he never led on to anything being wrong. If we’d have known, we’d have gone out of our way to help him. Stephen was just that kind of guy.This year's charity golf outing is in memory of Stephen and we are raising funds to support organizations who help people make it through their struggle. TaskHusky has already committed a $1,000 donation to this years event.We are looking for merchants who are willing to provide an item for our silent auction. In exchange for that gift you will receive: Mention of your store in an upcoming edition of your favorite newsletter (this one). Your logo included on a hole sponsor sign paid for by TaskHusky. Inclusion in a thank you blog post with a hotlink back to your store.Just hit REPLY to this newsletter and tell me you're in. Thanks.PS: Check on all your friends ... even if they seem happy. AND, if you think you need help, you do. Get some. We all love you.

This Week’s Target: Shop.Adele.com

Company Profile

Adele is awesome. I'm a fan.

There, I said it. Glad to get that off my chest. But as awesome as the golden-throated chanteuse from London is, her online business ain’t great. Her entire web presence feels completely neglected. Perhaps it’s an “artist thing,” but Adele as a brand still has significant cachet and value. She still sells a great amount of music, primarily through download services like Apple Music. And her Shopify site still lists merch. I'm not so much a fan of the website.

The Shopify Theme They Use

Why does Adele need a custom theme here? She absolutely DOES NOT. Total waste of money. Someone sold her. She has a handful of products and no big inventory or accounting integrations.

Don’t you hate when your heroes get ripped off like this?

The Good Stuff

Express Payment options. We tell everyone who’ll listen. It’s not just a trust thing. It makes it super easy to buy. “Easy to buy” = money.

This site is a speed rocket ship. Even though it is obviously being neglected now and even though a custom theme was not necessary, whoever built the site knew what they were doing. It is one of the fastest loading sites we’ve ever seen on Shopify. I checked several pages and they all load like they’re on jet fuel.

I’m a big fan of home pages like this. It is basically a series of four hero images with calls to action. Remember that when you are running ads AND when folks find you via search, they more often arrive at a special landing page that you created or on a collection or product page. People who come to your Home page are more often arriving with intent. You market and sell to them differently. This site gets it.

Needs Improvement

If someone was taking a picture of me

it would kind of creep me out.

OK … this seems a bit unfair because whoever is being paid to keep the site up to date is not doing it. And as products sell out they are dropping off display which is why things are so sparse. But even with all of that, the product pages just phone it in (pun intended) and have no descriptions … in fact they never did. Pure laziness from day 1.

But the terms of service were updated just a few days ago, so I’m confused. The site is controlled by UMG Commercial Services in Santa Monica, CA, which is music industry management and promotions. They may be running the site on auto-pilot.

Apps They Deploy

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

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

  • Font Awesome — Font library.

  • Google Font API — Another font library (why 2?)

No, I did not miss anything. This may not be a complete list, but this site has no extra tracking, no retargeting, no nothing. There are a few services running to help developers out, but basically there’s nothing to see here.

Marketing Stuff They Do

Normally we would have a listing of marketing initiatives and even screen captures of ads a site is running. In this case, there simply are none to show you

I ran some analytics and they are still ranked #1 in several target categories of natural organic search. There is a TON of solid link juice built in here. This site still gets

between 9,000 and 10,000 monthly visitors … all of them leaving disappointed

.

Thousands of dollars in potential sales are simply wasting away. Adele may be

Rolling In The Deep

, but she ain’t singing about online sales.

If you sell anything Adele-related, you can beat them.

Sponsored

Time to make your Shopify website sing. 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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