CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2146

Hey *|FNAME|* — Ironic Products for BFCM … on Shopify

Hello —

The thing about Black Friday / Cyber Monday (BFCM) is that it’s not over yet.  It will be over by the time you read this, but the eCommerce world is still knee-deep in the Cyber Monday part as I write it. I’m hearing mixed reviews and numbers at this point. Sure, all the so-called “news” stations are doing their normal Black Friday stories and Amazon is “forecasting” this and Adobe is “projecting” that and no one really knows what the heck will happen. The authoritative researchers will get to work as fast as they can and put the data together, but realistically it’s a week before we know anything, and I can’t wait. So, first things first. Let’s keep it really simple … reply to this email and just tell me if your BFCM sales are up, down, or about the same as last year. This will be our unofficial sampling of Shopify stores in the real world and I’ll let know what happens. Because even if online sales are up from last year, it’s no good to us normal folks if all the cash went to fund Jeff Bezos’ next girlfriend. So now let’s take a look at an unusual Shopify store that probably saw a DECREASE in sales over the BFCM weekend, but they don’t care because they sell to people who don’t live in the real world. So, let’s get to it. Here’s this week’s teardown.Happy Selling,Zachary

This Week’s Shopify Target: Ledger.com

Whenever I say “bitcoin” or “Crypto” in the office half of the team snickers “Bit-diots!” and the other half lights a candle and starts to chant like Tibetan monks while shooting lasers out their eyes to destroy the Federal Reserve. But whether you’re a decentralization fanatic on one side or have an actual economics degree on the other, Ledger.com is shooting up the ranks of Shopify stores selling what can only be called the most ironic product in the world of crypto currencies.

They sell “hardware wallets.” Actually devices that you can carry around to hold your invisible ponzi-money. Well, you can’t actually carry it around because it doesn’t exist. Bitcoin and other crypto are pretty much just entries in a ledger … which also makes the name of the company rather ironic. But they are sure selling a LOT of empty wallets right now. They are the 6

largest Shopify store in the world right now, up another 12% from last week. And they only sell 2 products at the moment: The Ledger X and the Ledger S.

These things are quite literally thumb drives. With a small digital LED display. And this is not the kind of thing that folks buy as gifts, so for these guys BFCM = a 4-day weekend.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

Custom theme … yadda yadda yadda … they spent too much and their father smelt of elderberries.

What They Did Good

The website design is clean and very modern … even if the jarring contrast of Black and Orange hurt my eyes. And I think that they did a good job because the site doesn’t “look” like a standard eCommerce site. It looks more like a tech startup or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) site. And that kind of design is likely more attractive to their target demographic … tech nerds who think that they are smarter than 10,000 years of monetary history.

What Needs to Be Improved

Their main site —

— is on Shopify. But they sell stuff through a subdomain — “

.” Dividing content this way only recommended in rare circumstances because it cuts your SEO in half. I have no idea why they are doing it. Maybe it’s some secret “crypto” web thing that a mere online business guy earning actual real profits wouldn’t understand.

We’ve already determined that their SEO needs work. If they actually worried about SEO they wouldn’t have to rely on expensive advertising so much in the long run.

The Shopify Apps That They Use

  • HubSpot — Marketing automation.

  • Hotjoar — heatmaps and user stats.

  • Riskified — Fraud prevention.

  • Zendesk — Customer support.

  • Bugsnag — How they catch all the bad code.

  • OneTrust — International cookie compliance.

  • Okta — An enterprise-grade authentication/identity management system.

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

  • Yoast — An obviously unused SEO plugin.

  • PayPal — Express payment option.

  • DoubleClick — Ad network.

  • Criteo — Behavioral target … which sounds creepy as heck.

That’s all we can see right now. Not a lot of apps. You could even hold them in your wallet.

Marketing Stuff That They Do

Ledger has social media presences on

,

,

, and

with tens and hundreds of thousands of follows across the social chasm. And they have a few hundred middle-aged stalkers following them on

. They also maintain code repositories on

… but unless you code for a living you just won’t care.

I was able to find no Google Search ads at all.

They are running TONS of social ads though, and here are 3 running right now, provided for your inspiration.

Sponsored

Is your Shopify site just not generating as much real cash as you think it should? 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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