CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2137

Hey *|FNAME|* … Sit Down And Read This … on Shopify

Hello —

You know how every week I start these emails with a little light-hearted entertainment and humor? Well, I’m going to take a moment here to step gently way from the regular Tuesday-morning chuckles and talk about two of my favorite subjects … donuts and the TaskHusky team. We do these eCommerce quick teardowns in the newsletter every week. But we’ve also done hundreds of full tear-downs as a premium service. Our guys do a REALLY good at it. They are so good at it that we’ve been invited to do a LIVE teardown at the biggest online ecommerce event of the year: The Black Friday Summit. It’s gonna be HUGE! Of course … I’m not going to actually tell my team that they do a good job. They’re a rebellious and feisty crew as it is. I’ll bring ‘em a box a donuts and call it good. OK … maybe just one donut that they can split. But the point is that I appreciate them. Anyway … check out the event with this link or just click the event banner below. And we're going to have some super-valuable prizes to give away during the session … prizes that are a LOT more valuable than a single donut with a bite taken out of it that may or may not have been there when I bought it but it wasn’t me even though there’s powdered sugar on my chin … who do you think you are, CSI?Happy Selling,Zachary

This Week’s Target: SecretLab.coCompany ProfileSecretLab was founded by two guys with Viking names — Ian and Alaric. The year was 2014 and these guys where competing semi-pro in Star Craft tournaments. Now, when I tell people that I’m a semi-pro athlete it means that I won a cash prize in a bowling league, and someone bought me a beer after kickball on Thursday. But I guess these guys were winning enough money to pay for their computer rigs, but not enough to go out on actual dates with real girls … which, to be honest, is not a high budget item for computer gamers if you get my drift. Anyway … one thing that computer gaming makes you an expert at is sitting in a chair for an unholy number of hours. And evidently that makes you an expert in comfort while fighting off Zerg hordes and Protoss Proto-Egyptian villains … and I am just a tad embarrassed that I know that. So, they founded their perfect gaming chair company and have gone on to earn some real money in the real world selling something delivered by UPS. They have risen to #52 in the Shopify Universe and are ranked ~#42k in all websites. And that, my friends, is a LOT of chairs. And now they have expanded into tables, and other gear. Ready Player One. The Shopify Theme They UseSecretLab uses a completely custom theme. And … as you know … I regularly mock Shopify eCommerce sites that spend a fortune on custom themes when an off-the-rack premium theme with a few custom tweaks is usually just as good for 10% the cost. But in the code I can see that these guys named the current version of their custom theme “Monster Hunter Launch” which made me laugh so they get a pass this week. The Good StuffThe site is really good-looking. They know their audience well and have designed around them. All that custom theme stuff? It really shows itself on the sophisticated and dynamic Product pages. Take a look at this example on a laptop. The mouse-over swivels the chair. There are tons of customization options. Plenty of social proof — which is vital in the gamin market. There are videos and images … everything you need. And when you're selling something that STARTS in $500 range and goes up to a grand, you need to treat it like the luxury product it is. And they do. And they use a payments app (Affirm in this case) to take the sting out of the cost. This has got to be important to their conversions. Express Payment options are also in clear view during checkout — ShopPay, ApplePay, and PayPal. GPay is available, but it looks like they hide it now.For these guys it's definitely Product pages for the win. Needs ImprovementThe pages are slow, but we’ve seen worse. But those Product pages are so slick I was waiting in eager anticipation. They do a good job, so let’s leave it at that this week. Apps They DeployWe ran a scan to see what Shopify apps & supporting services they are deploying. Get a load of this list:

  • HotJar — Heatmap analytics.

  • Klaviyo — Customer lifecycle management.

  • FreshChat — Duh … it’s live chat.

  • Zendesk — Customer support.

  • BugSnag — This code error tool is getting more and more popular.

  • Stamped — Ratings and reviews.

  • ipdata — Geolocation analytics.

  • Magnific Popup — Lightbox popup plugin.

  • Refersion — Affiliate tracking.

  • Affirm — Installment payments.

  • ApplePay/ShopPay/PayPal — Express payment options.

This may not be a complete list. But it is also worth saying that there is some heavy-duty coding skill behind the scenes. I saw a ton of coding frameworks and optimizers lurking in the digits. It's almost as if all hours hours and ays sitting behind computer screens navigating their avatars through Terran war landscapes actually taught them something about computers.

Marketing Stuff They DoFirst I want to say that Amazon is playing dirty pool again. If you search for the actual brand ‚ not “gaming chair” but for the actual brand SecretLab — you are fed a heaping diet of cheap knock-offs that are blatantly ripping off the SecretLab designs. I’d like to tell Bezos where to put his lame rocketship. That said, SecretLab is an ADVERTISING MACHINE. They do social on Facebook, Intagram, Twitter, and YouTube … and they do a good job. They also have paid ads on social. What’s REALLY impressive is that they have multi-language ads. We found English, German, and Korean — obviously they know their audience. There are social ad samples of each below. These are followed by three sample paid Google search ads they are running right now. All provided for your edification, education, and inspiration.

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