CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2117

Playing Along with TheMusicZoo on Shopify

May 04, 2021

Hello - 

Did you guys watch the Oscars last week? I didn’t. In fact, nobody did.

Well, when I say “nobody” I mean that less then 10 million people watched. And while 10 million sounds like a lot to most of us, it is a 

 viewership. And sure, interest in The Academy Awards has been steadily dropping for years. And everyone is talking about this as a great big ‘ol bag of failure. But everyone seems to forget something really important.

THERE WERE NO MOVIES LAST YEAR. (duh!)

Go ahead … name a major motion picture release from last year … I dare you. Everyone was watching Coming 2 America on Amazon or binge-watching old episodes of Banachek and Psych on Amazon Prime. It’s kind of hard to get folks all psyched up to watch movie stars from the 1990s get all dressed up to self-congratulate the industry and virtue-signal politics for three hours after like the worst year ever when no one in the world consumed the product.

Back in March 

. The Grammys are for music of course. And all those Hollywood and Music industry execs held back their best stuff because they didn’t know how the pandemic (HISS!) would impact sales. So, what did everyone do? Since the entertainment industry let us all down, folks took it back in-house and 

, that’s what.

No wonder our target this week had a banner year in 2020 AND in Q1 2021. Let’s take a look.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: TheMusicZoo.com

Company Profile

I have a joke for you.

Q: How do you make a guitar player get off your front porch?

A: Pay for the pizza.

If you laughed at the joke, then you are probably in the target audience for TheMusicZoo.com. These guys buy used music equipment — mostly guitars — and resell them. It’s actually a huge market. But business is so good that they have started selling some new guitars too. Since they are a private company, they keep revenue numbers confidential. But they have grown to be the #42 most popular site on Shopify AND a top 25 site in the entire Rock & Roll universe, and that means some serious ca’ching!

The Shopify Theme They Use

I’m getting pretty sick of all these custom Themes. It’s like the bro’s trying to harsh my buzz. But when I saw how freak’in fast this site loaded …. We’ll get to that in a minute.

The Good Stuff

Some of Google's Page Insight metric nit-pic here and there, but I’m telling you that this site loads like a rocket-ship on steroids. The images a nearly perfectly formatted for a balance of speed and quality. Total page size is streamlined. And this multi-million-dollar website is spot-on perfect for external calls

As we’ve said a bazillion times, adding extra apps just slows you down.

The shopping cart integration is super clean and super-fast with plenty of Express Payment options AND financing plans for certain products through the Affirm app integration.

They know their audience RALLY well. It’s obvious that these guys not only sell guitars, they LOVE what they sell. The images show what matters to musicians and there is the 

 where they need it.

Needs Improvement

Bad stuff? I got noth’in. If I bump into these guys at the next Shopify Unite event I will simply buy them a drink and ask for a BFF discount.

Apps They Deploy

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

  • InstantSearchPlus — On-site search optimization (and this one is implemented very well).

  • CallRail — Click to Call and call recording.

  • PDG Software — Third-party shopping cart integration.

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

  • Hostway DNS — third-party DNS service for extra speed.

This may not be a complete list. But did you notice how FEW apps and integrations these guys have? This is one of the main reasons the site is so freak’n fast!

Marketing Stuff They Do

These guys market where their customers are. That means online — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest plus a special musician social commerce platform called Reverb. Here are three current Facebook ads to serve as inspiration.

Sponsored

Does your Shopify site strike a bad chord? 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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