CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2212

The Long and Short of It … On Shopify

Yo - We have a giant at TaskHusky.Seriously … a member of our team is 6’3” and clocks in at 250lb solid. He shows up for work every day and goes about his tasks with a generally good attitude, but the UPS guy won’t come all the way inside to make deliveries anymore. His shoulders are so wide he has to turn sideways coming in the front door. He got hurt at the office once by scraping the back of his hands when they dragged on the floor as he walked back and forth to the coffee machine.No one seems to know what the giant does here exactly because everyone’s kind of afraid to ask. Anyway … yesterday I was feeling brave and so I walked up behind him, reached up to tap him on the belt, and asked what he was working on. He patted me on the head and replied, “Thog like Zach. Zach funny. Zach make Thog laugh. Thog not hurt Zach.”I have decided to add “not hurt Zach” to every employee’s job description.The rest of the team here at TaskHusky are normal-person sized. That means the office is filled with a group of men and women ranging in height between 5’4” and 5’10”. Me? Well, let’s just say that I am in that range. And as I watched Thog eat a whole chicken on his lunch break yesterday I was reminded of 3 things:

  1. No matter your size, race, religion, or creed we are all just people on the inside … except for Thog because I’m pretty sure a DNA test will prove that he’s an unfrozen Neanderthal.

  2. It’s best to remove chicken feathers before you eat the chicken.

  3. The average height of a man in the US is actually 5’9”.

And another thing … a few weeks ago I asked if any of our newsletter subscribers wanted to, ahem … have their Shopify sites “reviewed” in this newsletter. One of our long-time customers responded, and their entire business model is based on selling products to right-sized men like me.Sounds good. Let’s hope it makes Thog laugh.Happy Selling,Zach

You Can Be Next!

Well, not “you” exactly. Who wants to get a newsletter about ”you,” right? But if you have a Shopify site and want that site to be front and center in an upcoming TaskHusky Checkout Weekly newsletter this is kind of cool.

Here’s the deal … we have spent the last few years focused on the larger Shopify stores. That’s great and all, but I thought it would be cool to give a few “normal” sites a load of free advice and such. And I will do just that. But keep in mind that I tell marginally humorous jokes and poke fun at everything. So, well, you get the idea.

Just reply to this email and say

“Tear me down Zach!”

and I’ll put you on the list for an upcoming issue.

This Week’s Shopify Teardown Target: Under510.com

One of the best things about Under510.com is their name and domain. Their business model IS their name. The curate and market clothes for men of average height and below. They proudly state that “We are not clothing designers. We are problem solvers.” Founder Elie Robinson and his partners – Greg Grinman and Johnathan Glaubach – focus like a laser on a target range of clothing sizes. It is that focus that give them the marketing niche every online store craves. They tailor (pun intended) their content and advertising accordingly, and it works. They even have a

. Good on them.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

Even though Under510 sells a lot of clothes, they are super smart about it. That means they looked hard until they found a standard premium theme that would work well, then did just a few tweaks and customizations to make it their own. This is the perfect balance of value and customization. The base theme they use was designed by our friends at Maestroo specifically for fashion and accessory brands – the

.

What They Do Well

If you look at their main menu tree they have created a category called “

.” This is brilliant. Not only does it make shopping for clothes easier for men (needed!), but it is intuitive and can filter out the disappointment of finding something you like only to click in to discover that it is not available in your size.

Love the overall brand focus across the board. They obviously understand their market. But make sure to check out the quibbles to their social strategies and needed improvements … they need to invest a bit more energy and time I think.

What Needs to Be Improved

That cool “

” category I mentioned in the previous section? It’s buried under a heading called “Sizing.” Make these 2 separate Main Menu items. I might even put it first, before things like “Bottoms” and “Tops.”

Also on that “

” page … note how the header image at top has a range of heights and images in it? Make each image clickable. As you scroll down you have some great profiles of each height with a Shop CTA. Let customers click the size in the image and either go to the bookmarked profile below or – even better – immediate Shop that height.

On the product pages the color selector causes an entire page refresh.

. When you go from black to blue, the entire page has to reload. Modern version of sites and themes support the change of only some content on that page making for a better user experience and lower bandwidth usage.

On

, I went through the checkout process. On the product page it is listed for $60. In the cart is is shown on sale in red text for $50. Then in the Shopping Cart it goes back to $60. There is something broken in your code dudes. That should not occur and be handled automatically.

On the home page you have a listing og “Bundles.” Bundles are good. But a text listing like that rarely works on new customers. Don’t cheap out or get lazy … do a bundles section with images. Better yet, make a bundles category page and management them there.

The Shopify Apps They Use

We used our top-secret Shopify scanning tools to determine that this site is using the following apps and plugins:

  • Klaviyo – Customer lifecycle management and automation.

  • Lucky Orange – Real time analytics and interaction.

  • Automizely – Traffic increase tool.

  • Digital Window – Affiliate marketing.

  • Back in Stock – Inventory alert system.

  • Searchanise – eCommerce website search function.

  • Stamped – Reviews and ratings.

  • Bugsnag – The app that snag bugs … in software. Seeing this app EVERYWHERE these days.

  • Langify – Content translation.

  • AmazonPay/ShopifyPay/PayPal/ApplePay/GooglePay – There are Express payment options. Love ‘em all.

  • Boomerang – Performance analytics. Just a little piece of code, actually.

  • Flickety – Touch responsive image carousels.

  • DoubleClick – Ad network.

That’s not too many apps, so good on them. But I can see at LEAST 4 different content deliver networks (CDNs) refenced in the code. Um … why? I see Facebook CDN, CloudFlare (industry standard), Microsoft Ajax CDN (old school!), and UNPKG. Is it possible they need all 4? Sure. Is it likely that they need all 4, nope. There are likely some old service calls that are just out there still calling into the internet ether for no reason at all. Should be looked at

Marketing Stuff They Do

Their social media work spans the full range of old-school platforms. They have

,

(not getting used at all),

,

,

, and

(starting to get neglected).

So, first thing to mention is that social media is like the Jedi arts … do, or do not, there is no try. If you are not going to post on Twitter for years then delete the account. But how hard is it to post on Twitter once per day? Same for LinkedIn, right?

They are actively running social and search ads and – as is our practice – here are 3 samples of each for your inspiration.

Sponsored

Let’s make your Shopify Site a perfect fit. If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.