CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2130

Hello - 

The pop singer Katy Perry is famous for a few things. There are the songs — like Firework, Roar, and I Kissed a Girl. She is also famous for her eclectic, almost cartoonish style, a questionable marriage to the tragically-mediocre comedian Russel Brand, and for being the current love-interest of Orlando Bloom. And — I am told by those in the know — she is also famous for her booties. Booties, sandals, sneakers, flats, pumps … she sells them all on her Shopify website. Do I think that the Teenage Dream-Girl is slaving away tweaking Shopify code at night after her so-called “day job” and shipping boxes out of a 9-car garage with a tape-gun in hand? That would be impressive, but no. If she is, I am going to apply to be her UPS driver. But no. That just ain’t the case. But as long as I am researching the Princess of Pop — for purely scientific purposes I assure you — let’s take a good long look at another celebrity Shopify site and see how her majesty is holding up online. Here’s this week’s teardown. Happy selling,Zachary

This Week’s Target: KatyPerryCollections.comCompany ProfileEvidently selling millions of records and having your concert tours gross well into the 9-figure range is just not enough to make ends meet. The poor princess of pop launched her Shopify site in 2016 to sell shoes, handbags, and related accessories. The numbers are all hush-hush, but the site is #256 in Shopify-land and a top 50k site on the interwebs. They sell on their website — of course — Facebook’s marketplace, and through a channel of physical retailers across the country. The list of retailers includes some VERY big names and the products appear on the websites of some of those stores too. They also sell on QVC AND on Amazon. The Amazon storefront also sells other branded products like perfumes, clothing, and music. They definitely have the multi-channel thing going on. The Shopify Theme They UseI like to see when big, successful celebrity brands do not get too caught up in the elitism of custom themes. Most of the time you just do NOT need one. The KatyPerryCollections site is built on a solid, basic them — Debut from Shopify. The Good StuffThe website generally looks pretty good. The photography is strong and everything seems on-brand. There’s not a lot of technical wizardry here, but there doesn’t need to be. Sometimes simplicity is best. I think that I’d look good in these The Star pumps. What do you think? When I went to purchase those Star pumps — you know, as research for this newsletter — I can see that they have at least 2 Express payment options displayed (4 would be better) and they use AfterPay for installment payments. Good for them. The shopping cart also has trust badges which I always appreciate. Needs ImprovementSomeone isn’t taking care of business here. As excited as I was to see a category of products called “Booties,” that category page is completely empty. The “Handbags” collection is also empty. Rule #1 is “never sell what you don’t sell.” OK … here is a great case study in unnecessary slowness. The Home page gets OK rankings from some page speed tools, but is absolutely HATED by the Google-bots — things like time to interactive, largest content load, and page layout shift are killing it. And I suspected that the HUGE hero image at the top was the culprit. Normally folks are in a hurry and forget to optimize and compress promo images. But as large as that image looks, it is actually fairly well optimized. But the problem is that — even though it is the biggest thing on the page and sits at the very top — it doesn't load until half-way down the code, So when it loads it makes the entire page jump and bounce. Google HATES that. It's an easy fix. All you have to do is force it to load early. Boom! 90% of your speed issues probably go away. There’s something very wrong here online. The social media was VERY active through May of this year … now, nothing. But they are running ads. See the Marketing section below. Red, 10-point font. That is like sooooooo hard to read, people! Darn-near triggered a seizure.  Apps They DeployWe ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying. Get a load of this list:

• Yottaa — User experience optimization.

• Loyalty Lion — Loyalty and rewards programs.

• Nosto — Personalizes shopping experience.

• Hotjar — Website user heatmaps.

• accessiBe — Website accessibility program.

• Quantcast Measurement — Demographic tracking.

• Okendo — Customer reviews.

• Foursixty — Instagram marketplace.

• Boost Commerce — eCommerce search.

• PayPal/AmazonPay — Express payment options.

• Afterpay — Installment payment option.

• DoubleClick — Retargeting ads.

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

Marketing Stuff They DoLike I said, they are doing multi-channel everything — the site, QVC, physical retailers, Amazon, Facebook, etc. But whoever was doing their organic social media stopped back in May … just stopped. They still run active ads on Facebook and Instagram. The problem is that they have 61k Facebook followers, 29k Twitter followers, and more than 532k Instagram followers and all that social attention power is being completely wasted. It’s a marketing crime. Anyway, here are some of the ads they ran recently for your inspiration.

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