CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2118

Hello - 

One thing about this stupid pandemic is it’s making us run out of shows to binge-watch. Don’t get me wrong, there are MORE than enough shows to stream on Netflix, and Disney, and Amazon Prime, and HBO Max, and whatever. But when it comes to binge-watching the question is whether the show is good enough to watch AGAIN or whether it is good enough to drone through four hours of sequential episodes on the sofa in your underwear while eating chicken nuggets.

Personally, I’ve re-watched all the Marvel films and the entire series of Friends … twice. Spoiler Alert: No matter how many times you watch, Ross never becomes less annoying. I cruised through every James Bond film, and that was fun. Once I get through a retrospective of Peter Sellers’ Pink Panther films all that’s left will be English period dramas.

I have managed to go my entire life so far without seeing a single episode of Downton Abbey and have no intentions of breaking that streak.

Speaking of English period pieces, here’s this week’s Shopify website teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: SisterJane.com

Company Profile

SisterJane is based in London and they sell, "Vintage-inspired accessible design with a high-end look & feel.” And they sell a lot of them. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the business many millions of dollars in sales per year with around 13 full-time employees. We also know that they have two other business brands under their portfolio for diversification. 

They were founded in 2011 by Enrico Ziglio (

you can read his interview on Forbes

). Their website is #23 is Shopify-land and a top 10k site worldwide. With those numbers, I would normally expect more sales volume, so I’m doubting some of the numbers this week. They also sell extensively on Amazon under their own brand and post regularly on social media — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. They also have the “Sister Jane Townhouse” in London for a real-world fashion experience and an adjoining restaurant.

AND … if you ever need that special outfit to wear to a cricket match at Martha Stewart’s house in the Hamptons or a puffy dress to LARP at your next Steampunk-Pirate party, they got you covered.

The Shopify Theme They Use

They have deployed a modified version of the Motion theme in Classic. 

Take a look at that theme here

. Seems a good choice.

The Good Stuff

The site is clean and on-brand — from the color palette to font and photography.

I really like the shopping cart integration. It slides in nicely from the right and is fully themed. It also makes good use of Express Payment options.

Again, I want to point out to everyone that the big brands do not waste any space in their main navigation for Home or About Us. Everything is about getting the customer to start shopping. Any other use of space in the main navigation is a waste. 

Needs Improvement

The site has some slowness issues that are going to hurt it with SEO. Not the worst We’ve seen, but definitely room for improvement. The code is fairly clean (there’s one failed Zendesk external call that’s all brokey brokey). And the number of calls is good. Page size is double best practices. They should take a look at their image optimization.

Speed-wise, the product pages are WAY out of whack. Terrible scores and they are 4x the file size they should be. This needs some work.

They allow the website to be set to different currencies. That implementation is a bit dicey. It’s slow and has a display fault. 

Apps They Deploy

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

• Back In Stock — Inventory alerts.

• IP Geolocation — Geolocation for site personalization.

• ShopifyPay/ApplePay— Express payment options.

• Rakuten — Shopper referral program.

This may not be a complete list. But did you notice how FEW apps and integrations these guys have? I say it all the time, folks. Many apps do not equal many sales.

Marketing Stuff They Do

These guys are conventional fashion media darlings. They work Instagram for sure, but they get a lot of earned media in the press. Interestingly, all of the Facebook and Instagram posts I saw were NOT ads. They were real posts by real people.

Also, I previously mentioned their Amazon marketing efforts. They have

several products listed

there.

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