CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2127

Feeling Unbreakable with IndestructibleShoes on Shopify

July 13, 2021

Hello -

Ever have one of those times when everything seems to just break? Last month was like that for one of our TaskHusky teammates. Cell phone broke, AirPods broke, computer broke, the A/C in the car broke, AND a water pipe broke in his apartment so they had to leave and go to a hotel. It’s hard to keep your chin up when $5k worth of tech takes a dump all at once and you have to flee like a refugee to a hotel in a car without A/C in the summer. Fortunately, things are getting back on track — he practices disciplined back-ups so all of his data was safe and he got a computer express shipped. There is at least a temporary patch on the pipe and the car is fixed (a grand later). But that’s just life, right? Crap comes at you hard in waves sometimes and you just gotta keep plugging along and deal with it. I thought about this a lot today. Running a business is like that too. In fact, a business has a life of its own. Running a business multiplies the number of times you gotta take care of things like that. We WISH everything was indestructible, but it’s just not. I think 90% of success is showing up and the rest is fixing stuff that breaks. You know what IS indestructible? Shoes apparently. Here’s this week’s Shopify teardown. Happy selling,Zachary

This Week’s Target: IndestructibleShoes.comCompany ProfileFirst off, gotta say I’m proud of these guys. They found a niche and stuck with it. That means that they OWN the search term “indestructible shoes” AND they even own the misspellings. Go ahead … do a Google search yourself. You’ll see that they own the entire page 1 results in some form or another — their site, reviews of their products, etc. Nobody can touch them at this point. They sell on their site — of course. And if you search for them on Amazon you will find a couple of companies BLATANTLY ripping them off in messaging and in some of the best styles. Jeff Bezos builds the greatest knock-off-and-steal from little guys engine in the world and then retires to take private space flights. Sum-thin ’jus ain’t right. But IndestructibleShoes.com is successful anyway. Shopify has something like 1.3 bazillion sites and they are in the top 300, so they are selling a LOT of these shoes that thou shalt not destroy. Important note: they are NOT on Shopify Plus as far as we can see, which is interesting at this volume. The Shopify Theme They UseTheir theme has been heavily customized, but the base theme is one of our persona favs … The Turbo Theme from Out of the Sandbox. And unless I am mistaken, they started with the Florence version and then built from there. The Good StuffLove the Product pages. Simple, clean and to the point. But you also have everything you need above the fold. I really like how they lead with a testimonial here. I’ve never seen that before and I am going to copy it for sure. They even have trust badges. It’s like they can read my thoughts. There is an old adage in advertising … “Don’t tell ‘em, show ‘em.” The split hero image is a brilliant example of that. On the lest you see an attractive shoe being run over by a car. On the right you see another attractive shoe stepping on nails and being hit with a sledgehammer. This is SO on-brand and perfectly demonstrates the core of everything this site is about. Needs ImprovementThe navigation needs to be improved. Look at that main menu. Position #1 is Track Order. What the freak? And About Us, Contact, and Blog all take up the most valuable navigational real estate on the site. These are UX and conversion felonies. I was about to compliment them on the deployment of Express payment options, but no dice. They ONLY have PayPal. Hey, I ‘jus loves me some PayPal as much as the next guy. But why not include AmazonPay, ApplePay, and ShopPay? Seriously … it improves conversions on consumer purchases guys! I also think that they should deploy installment payment options. At least they should test it.  At the risk of sounding like a broken record, these guys need to improve their page speed — especially as viewed by Google bots. A little investment in this now will go a LONG way to ensuring that they retain that high SEO ranking in the future. Guys … trust me … you can do a LOT better than 10MB page loads, broken code, and 278 external calls. It’s ridiculous! And I’ll give you a hint … there are six broken external calls on the Home page alone doing 70% of the damage. And those calls were on EVERY page I looked at. Seriously guys … call me. I can help. Apps They DeployWe ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying. Get a load of this list:

  • Klaviyo — Marketing Automation.

  • OptiMonk — Retargeting.

  • Recart — Cart abandonment app.

  • Bold Commerce — They are using Bold’s upsell app.

  • Reamaze — Customer support.

  • Bugsnag — Seeing this a lot more these days .. it finds code errors. But it you read the “Needs Improvement” section above, it appears that they are not using this app … at least not well.

  • PayPal/AmazonPay/ApplePay — Express payment options. The code shows these three installed, but only PayPal appeared in my test. Odd.

  • Flickity — a JavaScript code library for making touch-responsive image carosels.

  • Refersion — Affiliate marketing and tracking.

  • DoubleClick — Ad network.

This may not be a complete list.

Marketing Stuff They DoThese guys keep it really simple. They have social media presences and are fairly active. AND they run a TON of Facebook/Instagram ads. They are on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.  I can also see that they have an affiliate marketing campaign running … I’ll bet that is working for them too. Here are three of their most current Facebook ads for inspiration.

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