CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2128

Hello -

Do you know what “yak shaving” is? Do you want to know? I wanted to know, so I Googled it. Turns out what I thought was the personal grooming habits of Himalayan bovine is something else entirely … and not what you’re thinking either. I discovered that the term comes from a Ren & Stimpy episode adopted by computer coders at MIT. And like so many other odd terms, I learned the definition at the UrbanDictionary.com site — THE place where real adults figure out what the teenagers and millennials are saying in slang behind our backs. I think that the site is fly and fleek. The info is totally crunk … fo’shizzle. Anyway … I noticed at the top of their site there’s a link to a store. Being the eCommerce manic maven that I am, I took a look and ‘sho-nuff, it’s a Shopify store — a very successful one. Tru’dat. If you want to get “Pspspsps” on a coffee mug or “GRILLBILLY” on a T-shirt this is where all the cool kids go evidently. But you know what? As successful as the shop is, it pretty much sucks and you should NOT copy what they do. Let’s talk about it. Here’s this week’s teardown. Happy selling,Zachary

This Week’s Target: UrbanDictionary.storeCompany ProfileUrbanDictionary.com is a crowdsourced content site — one of the first. They sell ads. And since they have been around since 1999, they have a LOT of link juice. It was started by Aaron Peckman when he was a computer science major at CalPoly. As of last year there were more than 12 million definitions, there are many language variants, the iPhone app has been downloaded a bazillion times, and the site gets upwards of 80 million users and 180 million pageviews per month, making it the 23rd most popular site in the US. There is also no shortage of legal issues and controversy — IBM loaded UrbanDictionary into their Watson AI language pack and the computer AI started cursing … which I think is hilarious. At some point in time, he created a very simple Shopify store along the way and linked to it from his site. Aside from some retargeting ads, they do almost no other marketing and Peckman is rumored to still be the sole employee. The store is a top 300 site on Shopify. The Shopify Theme They UseThis is DEFINITELY a Shopify site. But they have blocked many external tools from grabbing info. I get it. Some of these tools can tell us which products sell the best and such. But the site is super-simple and obviously a print-on-demand fulfillment only array of products. It almost feels like an afterthought. The Good StuffMy folks always told me that if you need to criticize you should start by saying something nice.  Sometimes that is a lot harder than other times. I do like their deployment of Express Payment options during checkout though. (whew!) There’s one more thing … the product search works. With so many terms, they have built a search function that generates product images on the fly based upon nearly any term or word in their database. This had to take some work … and it works. But instead of hiding it up in the header, it seems to me that the ability to have ANY term from the Urban Dictionary instantly on a product is a core coolness. They should lead with it in the Hero area IMHO. Needs ImprovementLike I said … this site does zero of anything. To the best of what I can see, they rely solely on eCommerce traffic coming directly from their content site and retargeting. There is no SEO to speak of, it loads super-slow, the images are stock from whoever his Print-on-Demand vendor is so they are not optimized, they are pricy, they do not offer returns, they charge for shipping, there is no social proof …. Should I go on? But here’s the deal … they have SO much traffic to their content site and make SO much money off of ads on the content they do not really “need” eCommerce at all. So, it feels like this Shopify site was set up to be as much of a no-brainer as possible without regard to conversions or whatever. For UrbanDictionary, it’s just a little more free money that doesn't interfere with cocktail hour. Apps They DeployWe ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying. Get a load of this list:

• Snowplow — Opensource analytics package.

• Algolia — Sophisticated search API (important for these guys).

• WuFoo — Data collection.

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

• Facebook Custom Audiences — Looks like they do some retargeting ads.

• Help Scout — Customer support app.

This may not be a complete list. But that’s a pretty small list.

Marketing Stuff They DoLike I said … they have Facebook and google pixels to generate retargeting opportunities. Their ads run on the Google retargeting ad network. They are pretty covert about any other tactics that they deploy. But they do have Facebook (4.7 million fans), Twitter (250k followers), and Instagram (130k followers). They have also started a newsletter and have a reported 78k subscribers — but for the life of me I can’t see where to subscribe.

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