CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2145

Hey *|FNAME|* — NOT Spy Gear, But Close … on Shopify

Hello —

Have you seen the new James Bond film yet? I haven’t, but I hear it’s pretty good. But I’m probably going to wait for it to come to Prime Video streaming. But I will definitely see it. I mean, come on … it’s James Freak’in Bond, right? All of those films are good. Well, almost all of them. All of the Sean Connery ones for sure, about half of the Roger Moore ones … Timothy Dalton did a little pinch-hitting for a couple of films, then we get Pierce Brosnan. Pierce was pretty good, but he lost me when he para-surfed a tidal wave after falling off a glacier in “Die Another Day.” If that is not an example of “jumping the shark” I don’t know what is. Darn near everyone agrees that Daniel Craig has done a great job. But this is his last film and folks are worried that the next Bond will be a vegan who drinks gently stirred soy lattes and chases evil SPECTRE agents responsibly in a Prius while posting Instagram selfies with cosplay stickers. Anyway … all that was on my mind when I went looking for this week’s teardown target. Right up there at the top of the Shopify leaderboards — currently the #2 Shopify site in the universe — is an online shop called SpiGen. Which I read as “Spy Gen” … as in “Spy Generation.” And I thought that this was a site that sold all the cool gadgets and gizmos to do spy stuff. You know … stuff like satellite transmitter watches, fountain pen guns, and teargas booby-trapped briefcases that the famous “Q” provides 007.  And you know what … they “almost” do sell stuff like that. No, you won’t find an Aston Martin with machinegun headlamps. But you will find watches and earbuds and phone cases and stuff like that. So, let’s get to it. Here’s this week’s teardown.Happy Selling,Zachary

Hey … wait just one gosh-darn minute there bucko. You haven’t heard about the eCommerce survey with prizes. Yep, that’s right, game on, it’s your birthday.

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Why prizes? Because we appreciate your time and aren’t ashamed to let you know.

This Week’s Target: Spigen.com

What a disappointment. “Spigen” has absolutely zero to do with actual spies. They say the name comes from two German words: “Spiegel” meaning mirror and “Gen” for fit. They go on to say something

but really … who’s gonna read that crap.

Show Me the Tech!

The company was founded in 2004

and in 2008 in one spot on their website,

, so I don’t know who to believe. And even though the name is made from 2 German words and the site looks German, they are actually based in South Korea. Got to admit that this whole lie-about-our-age and German/South Korean confusion thing has got me scratching my head. All that is just super-odd.

But they sell on their website, have huge physical product distribution in

,

stores, and a bunch of other places. Like I said, their site is currently #2 in Shopify and #2488 of all websites everywhere … and these are HUGE numbers in every country no matter how old you are..

The Theme That They Use

Yep. Custom theme. Hundreds of millions of dollars in sales will do that to you.

What They Did Good

The site looks good. The images are great and the code is super-clean. For a site of this size the pages load super-fast. I think that this is why they spent the money to build a customer theme. You simply cannot get this kind of performance from an off-the-rack theme. You’ve got to dig deep into the code and yank out everything that is not needed and even recode a few things better than Shopify codes it. Seriously … that’s what I think they did here. They hallowed out the Shopify install into a shell and then stuck a Ferrari engine inside.

99.99% of Shopify stores can’t do that. These guys can and did.

But here’s the deal … other than that this is a pretty standard site. If you are going to take the time and spend the cash to do a full custom Shopify build I think you should put a little extra special sexy in it somewhere… a little something James Bond. Just saying … no special sexy here.

Express Checkout options work fine and load fairly well. The product pages have everything you need and not one thing more. It I didn’t know better I would think this was an actual German website … all about the modern engineering.

What Needs to Be Improved

There is really nothing “wrong” here. All of it is common senses and straight forward.

The Apps That They Use

  • Klaviyo — marketing customer lifecycle management.

  • Loyalty Lion — Loualty programs.

  • Zotabox — Website marketing tools.

  • Bugsnag — How they catch all the bad code.

  • Formstack — 3rd party form building tool.

  • Yotpo — For the collection of yots …. Just kidding. It’s a social reviews widget.

  • PayPal/ApplePay/ShopifyPay — Express payment options. (worth it!)

  • DoubleCkick — Ad network.

That’s all we can see right now. Not a lot of apps, folks. Take the hint and keep your Shopify website sharp.

Marketing Stuff That They Do

Spigen focuses on 4 social media platforms;

,

,

, and

. YouTube is out of date, but the other 3 are very current. They are running a LOT of ads — both in search and in social media.

The Facebook and Instagram ads are in multiple languages. I saw Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, German, French and a bunch more. In addition, they are running a large search campaign. I have included 3 search ad samples and 3 Facebook ad samples below for your inspiration.

Sponsored

Is your Shopify site shaken, not stirred? If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.

.

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