CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2122

In the Bag with RebeccaMinkoff.com on Shopify Plus

June 08, 2021

Hello -

Wow … Tuesday is here again and I am ready and rare’in to go. I had a good weekend … got outside and did some stuff. Hope you all did too.

Our eCommerce lesson for the week is … “Women Like Handbags.” They buy a lot of them online. Class dismissed.

When I was searching for our eCommerce target for this week’s teardown I came across Rebecca Minkoff and I gotta be honest … I immediately thought of the cartoon villains from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show

. Then I thought of

in the James Bond classic “From Russia with Love.”

Too much television watch’in got me chasing dreams … I guess.

RebeccaMinkoff.com has nothing to do with evil Spectre villains or plots to catch moose and squirrel. But they do have a great Shopify story so let’s get to it.

Here’s this week’s teardown.

Happy Selling,

Zachary

This Week’s Target: RebeccaMinkoff.com

Company Profile

Like I said in the opening, “Women Like Handbags.” Turns out that this CAN be a business model. And a pretty good one at that.

Rebecca Minkoff, the company, was founded in New York in 2005 by sisters Rebecca and Uri Minkoff. Rebecca was doing her own designs as a side hustle back in 2001 before “side hustle” was a thing. TV star and “It Girl” of the moment Jenna Elfman wore a Rebecca-designed “I Love NY” T-shirt on the Jay Leno Show — you know, The Tonight Show back when it was funnier. Anyway, sales took off and the side hustle became the main hustle, formalized by legal incorporation in 2005.

In addition to their top 100 Shopify Plus eCommerce site, they have several prestigious physical store locations in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Korea. They also make a special line of their products available through a network of >600 retail resellers, sell via social like the marvelous marketing monkeys they are, and have an active Amazon storefront. Like I said …. they sell a lot of handbags.

The Shopify Theme They Use

For Rebecca Minkoff, selling online was always part of the plan. And for a LONG time they used Magento Commerce. If you didn’t know, Magento still is powerful eCommerce software, but it is notoriously expensive and hard to use — requiring a credit check and PhD in Computer Science to open in a browser window. That lesson learned through blood, sweat, and cash, they decided to migrate to Shopify Plus. The custom theme and migration were

— an agency in San Diego.

The Good Stuff

The site looks really good. This is a professional job. It made me want to buy a handbag, and I would have but the color clashed with my truck.

Seriously … take a good look at the navigation. There is no messing around. The Home page has ZERO distractions. It’s all about shopping. It says, “We’ve got great products, you want ‘em, let’s get started.” Even the Call To Action (CTA) up top says “Get Yours.”

I like the product pages. Sophisticated use of space, nice installment payment option — in this case Klarna, but AfterPay or another would be good as well. This is a conversion magnate for more expensive consumer goods like this. When I drilled down I saw that in the checkout they have both Klarna AND AfterPay … don’t know why. Maybe they have some analytics showing that this helps?

I was originally going to mildly criticize the product descriptions, but in this case the visuals sell the product. Handbags and similar products are all about the emotion. But I might add at least one lifestyle image to every product page.

I like the little pun on the product pages … it says “Add to Bag” instead of cart. You get it.

Needs Improvement

Everyone seems to be still catching up since Google started slapping the crap out of page speed metrics last month. Even though the pages load fairly quickly from the user experience point of view, the Google bots no likey.

I can see 2 Express Payment options — PayPal and AmazonPay. But there are two issues. First, a customer has to wait until the final Checkout screen, so they will have already manually entered all their info. Not very “express-like” if you ask me. Second, why not include at least ApplePay? I can see ApplePay and ShopPay in the code, but not displayed?

Apps They Deploy

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

  • Klaviyo — eCommerce marketing and automation.

  • Attentive — Personalized messaging.

  • SwellRewards — Customer loyalty programs.

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

  • BorderFree — internationalization

  • Content Square — User experience analytics.

  • BlueCore — Email automation.

  • Findify — Website search tool.

  • Bronto — Cross-channel marketing automation.

  • Tatari — TV ad to sales analytics.

  • Riskified — Fraud detection (a big deal for brands like this)

  • Marin Software — Search optimization.

  • Back in Stock — Customer inventory notifications.

  • Narvar — eCommerce shipping tracking and visibility.

  • Yotpo — Social review widget.

  • DoubleClick — Ad network.

This may not be a complete list. There are some unused apps in the code. And there are 191 external calls and nearly 4MB of heft on the home page alone.

and it had 258 external calls and nearly 5MB in heft — failed all tests. Completely unnecessary.

Marketing Stuff They Do

Social Ads

Rebecca Minkoff is very active on social and actively using influencers. They launched 12 different ad campaigns on June 7

alone — and each one of those had multiple versions using still images and video. Evidently, their evil plot to conquer the world takes place on social media.

438k Facebook followers

>900k Instagram followers

880k on Twitter

175k on Pinterest

Who knows how many on Snapchat?

Here are some screen captures of the latest three

ads for inspiration.

Amazon

They have an extensive Amazon storefront. Lots of products and decent effort. Click the image to take a look.

Pinterest

Makes total sense that Pinterest would be a good channel for them. And as you can see, customers can shop directly from this screen. Looks good ... click the image to see.

YouTube

Here is their YouTube page. Even though it looks good, it doesn't look like they devote a lot of continuing effort here. Click the image to see for yourself.

Sponsored

Want more money in your fashionable wallet? We can help. 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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