CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2126

Feeling Patriotic with AAFNations on Shopify Plus

July 06, 2021

Hello -

Happy day-after, the day-after July 4th! It always messes with my head when we have a 3-day weekend/holiday. Especial this one. The holiday is called “4th of July” for goodness’ sake. You’d think that we’d just celebrate it … like, you know, ON THE 4TH OF JULY and that’d be it. But no … we all took the next day off — July 5th. The banks and post office and stock markets ... all closed. Today everyone goes back to work like it was Monday … but it’s Tuesday. Anyway … in order to ensure that none of us forget what the 4th of July was actually about, I went out and found the biggest, baddest, most no-holds-barred patriotic in-yo-face American-style Shopify site on the interwebs for this week’s teardown. A website so cliché and non-politically correct that it doesn’t have a cookie notice, it has a trigger warning. If Chuck Norris had a Shopify eCommerce store, this would be it. Here’s this week’s teardown.

Happy selling,Zachary

This Week’s Target: AAFNation.comCompany ProfileAAFNation is patriotic, but they have a great sense of humor about it too. Any site that has fine art hero images of Teddy Roosevelt riding a T-rex does not take itself too seriously, and I like that. They are a veteran-owned business founded in 2016, and according to their About Us page, “We created American AF for one reason and one reason only: To bring you the most AMERICAN collection of clothing the world has ever seen.” The “AAF” in their names stands for … well, I’ll let you figure that out for yourself. They’ve got a great PR campaign that has got them earned media in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and a couple dozen other major publications. They are the 273rd most popular site on Shopify Plus, which means a lot of folks are buying George Washington shirts and flag-striped boxer shorts. The Shopify Theme They UseYep, this is a custom theme. I wonder if it was made in America? The Good StuffNo matter how you feel about the product themselves, these guys know their brand and the stay on brand — Kitschy Americana Humor. Even their email subscription CTA has an on-brand message: “ONLY COMMIES SEND SPAM... AND WE AREN'T COMMIES.” I know some multi-million-dollar brands who do not stick to their brand as well as these guys do. Great implementation of Express Payment options – PayPal, etc. they load as fast as we’ve ever seen. Makes it super-easy to one-click buy. This makes them money. The product pages make good use of space and the implementation of options — product, size, etc. — looks old-school but works well. Here’s an example. Needs ImprovementNavigation is too crowded. First, they can take the Contact Us and About Us links out of that main menu right away and put them in the footer where they belong. As entertaining as their site is, they have slowness issues. For the VAST majority of sites this would be a huge problem because … well, because Google. But AAFNation relies on email, virality, and customer loyalty so they are likely going to be OK. A lot of the slowness is image size and sheer number of images since they make the Home page scroll forever with products. The checkout process is too clunky. The apps they use for suggestive upselling load WAY too slow. Apps They DeployWe ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying. Get a load of this list:

  • Hotjar — Website user heatmaps.

  • SteelHouse — Behavioral analysis and real-time onsite offers.

  • Affiliatly — Affiliate marketing.

  • REDretarget — Retargeting ad platform.

  • Bugsnag — As the name implies, it finds bugs in code.

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

  • DoubleClick — Ad network.

  • Criteo — Behavioral targeting.

This may not be a complete list.

Marketing Stuff They Do

These guys keep it really simple. They have social media presences and are fairly active. But not a lot of paid ads. They appear to rely on users resharing the content, and I bet that works for them. They are on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter ... but their focus is on Instagram where they are meme warriors. Their sense of humor and brand/product focus gets thousands of likes and shares with each post. I can also see that they have an affiliate marketing campaign running … I’ll bet that is working for them too. So, these guys sell millions of dollars of highly visual gear with almost no social ad spend. But they obviously do spend on affiliate and retargeting ads.

Sponsored

Need help making your Shopify site stand up and salute? If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.

.

Share the Love

Sharing is good, and it's time for you to share your favorite Shopify newsletter. How about you forward this email to a worthy entrepreneur right now – just

and share the love.

And if you're lucky enough to have a friend who shared this awesome email with you, Welcome!

for yourself. You’ll be glad that you did.