CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2149

Hey *|FNAME|* — Decking the Halls with Luxury … on Shopify

Hello —

Holy frijole! Christmas is almost here. It’s THIS Saturday. Get those last-minute express shipments out the door folks. The Christmas clock is ticking. And as soon as you get those shipments out the door, get to work on your after-Christmas sales. Figure out what you still got in stock and get it out of stock as fast as you can. Obviously, this is a big and important time of the year for retailers both online and off (duh!). And this particular holiday season was super-challenging a several ways:

  • It was year 2 in the seemingly never-ending pan-damn-ic.

  • There is a global supply-chain backlog that is making life hard in our just-in-time-delivery world.

  • Inflation is spiking — bringing price stability questions to the fore.

  • It was a short buying season this year with only 30 days in between Thanksgiving and Christmas this year (some years we have as many as 33)

 In spite of all that, it’s folks like you that make it all work. I hope you accomplished all of your goals. This time of the year we are all in the Christmas business. But that got me thinking. What if you're like Santa? What if Christmas IS your business? I went out looking for Shopify stores that don’t just make a lot of sales during the holidays … these guys make ALL of their sales for the entire year during the holidays. And I found a couple dozen of them. Let’s take a look at one of them.Happy Selling,Zachary

Christmas Shopify Target #1: FabulousFairytales

You know how when you go through Home Depot or Walmart and see pallets of clear plastic tubes holding 3 dozen plasticized ornaments on sale for $7.99? FabulousFairtales is the opposite of that. This is a site where you go to buy a single, perfect, handmade ornament. Where a decorative

, a

, and a single hand-blown

.

Paul Clancy founded this online-only store in 2010 and is based in London, shipping world-wide to a legion of folks who are crazy for this kind of stuff. The site was originally called “Milly’s Fairies,” but they changed the name in 2019. Can’t say that I blame them.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

The

from our friends at Out of the Sandbox has been a perennial favorite. And FabulousFairytales is using a customized version of it with just a few tweaks. Looks pretty good.

What They Did Good

They are keeping it REALLY simple. The theme is only lightly customized. It’s mostly deployed as-is. I think that this works for them.

The photography is good and on point. When you are selling $100 tree baubles, they better look good.

What Needs to Be Improved

OK … I just don’t get it. I was thinking that a business like this … one that is not running social ads (see below) … simply HAD to have an extensive mailing list that they were using to drive season repeat business. So, I went to the site and waited for the subscribe call-to-action. And I waited. And I waited.

Nothing.

If you scroll all the way to the bottom of the home page you can see that they have a subscribe form n the footer. But heck … it’s almost hidden. There is just no way that this is not costing them thousands and thousands of dollars each year.

In fact … they are doing almost NO marketing or conversion monitoring at all (see below).

The site is so clean, I expected it to be faster. Turns out they are carrying a heavy image load … more than 4MB of images. Image optimization would be easy, low-hanging fruit to fix.

The product pages are boring and break all the conversion rules. Again, just the basics would be a big improvement. I'm saying go all crazy, but some trust badges and such are super easy to deploy.

The Shopify Apps That They Use

OK … this is VERY unusual.

  • Bugsnag — An app that finds code errors and all the cool kids are using it these days.

  • ShopPay/PayPal/ApplePay — Express payment options.

  • Google Analytics — Website analytics that everyone uses.

  • GrizzlyApps — Currency converter.

That’s it.

4 apps and plugins

. This has to be the shortest list I ever seen. Hey … I am always preaching the fewer apps the better, but this is ridiculous. They are doing no marketing at all.

I can't help thinking that they need something to get the word out a bit more ... something that screams Christmas.

Marketing Stuff That They Do

I am beginning to think that these guys are allergic to marketing. who knows ...maybe they think that they have enough sales ... maybe they do not want to grow their business ... maybe ... naw, I still don't get it.

FabulousFairytales has

,

,

, and

pages. But they are not very active at all. And we have able to locate ZERO paid social media ads. None. Nada. Bupkis. Zip. I am not trying to judge too harshly here. But even if they installed just one or two more apps to do influencer and affiliate marketing I think it could be a win for them.

But they do a bit of paid search ads. I’ve grabbed a few of their campaigns from this season to show you for inspiration.

Sponsored

January is the PERFECT time to update your site. We can help. 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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