CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2223

Who’s Yo Daddy? … on Shopify

Yo -

Over the years it’s gotten a little safer out there to surf the interwebs. Used to be that you could type “.com” when you meant to type “.gov” and end up on a website no one wants listed in their browsing history. These days, browsers have a few content protections and some of the wild-wild-west of domain name ownership has been cleaned up.

Why do I bring this up today, you ask? Well, in my never-ending search to find interesting Shopify sites to educate and entertain you all with each week, sometimes I stumble into no-Zach land.

For example … this upcoming Sunday is Father’s Day. So I said to myself, “Self …

you sexy Shopify beast you

… find a Dad-related or Father-adjacent site and do that one this week.” So I made a list of words like Dad, and Father, and keep off the grass, and BBQ, and such.

Turns out that if you search for those things in the right combination, you will find a real Shopify website that sells pre-rolled joints. No kidding. It’s some combination of …. ahem, “hemp” laced with CDB oils and such in such a way as to skirt the fringes of legality in 37 states plus the District of Columbia. Normally, I would not even link to the site like this because, well, workplace safe dude. No one wants a visit from HR asking about their browsing history. But if you are not on a company network – unless you OWN the company network – you can visit the Shopify site “

” for yourself. They are a top 200k website and they are using the

if you’re interested.

The only thing missing from that site are Cheech and Chong DVDs.

Still feeling the effects of the internet contact high from that site

, I continued my search and came up with several golfing-related sites (boring!). Then I found what may be the perfect Father’s Day gifting site because it sells T-shirts and hats with bad puns and odd logos and they got in trouble on social media and … well, you can see for yourself.

But ironically, this site too has a grass problem.

Let’s meet this week’s Shopify teardown target.

Happy Selling,

Zach

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: DadBrandApparel.com

We don’t know much about Dad Brand Apparel. There is no “About Us” page, I found no media interviews. I can see that they started their social media efforts in December of 2016 and they are based in Los Angeles, CA.

They are a top 350k site on the entire interwebs, which is actually not that bad. If you are ranked that well you are likely selling enough to pay the bills and have some fun doing it. You can tell from the puns and insider jokes on the products that these folks have a sense of humor.

And that REALLY makes me want to know what they did to get kicked off of Twitter.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

For all their cheeky attitude, DadBrand resisted the temptation to waste a bunch of startup capital on a custom theme. Instead, they smartly used a standard theme and then made tweaks and modification to make it their own. Well done Web Guy at DadBrand!

If you want to take a look, they are using a standard Shopify

, “Black and White” variant.

What They Do Well

I like their sense of humor.

They are using a nice selection of Express payment options.

I am writing a third line in this section to be nice.

What Needs to Be Improved

DadBrandApparel has a grass problem.

At the time I am writing this, the entire top hero area is a picture of grass with their logo on it. That’s got to be the biggest waste of expensive eCommerce real estate I’ve seen in a long time. And that big field of grass image is HUGE and takes too long to load (no excuse folks … totally fixable!).

The navigation is hard to see in desktop viewing. It’s a little easier on mobile.

On the rest of the home page there are a LOT of hats. I get it ... they sell a lot of hats and make a few bucks doing it. But that is just a part of what they do. They sell shorts and swimsuits and socks and sweatsuits, and … well, you get the idea. There should be categories represented below that big grass image.

The shopping cart is awkward and loads slowly. Also, there are no upsell incentives or trust badges or anything. Kind of sucks to be them.

There is only a single image for most products and almost no descriptions. Product pages look barren.

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:

  • Beeketing — Market suite.

  • Omnisend — eCommerce marketing automation.

  • Attentive — Mobile messaging.

  • Lucky Orange — Real time analytics and engagement.

  • A bunch of tracking pixels.

  • Bugsnag — When there are little bugs, in your code no good. Who ya gonna call?

  • FastClick — A bit of code that shortens click delays on mobile sites.

  • Privy — Email marketing automation.

  • Bold UpSell — An app for product upselling. But I did not see it used anywhere on the site at all. Hmmmm.

  • PayPal/ShopPay/AmazonPay/ApplePay/GooglePay — All this big express payment options.

  • Route — Shipping protection.

That’s a reasonably short list.

Marketing Stuff They Do

I was not able to find any search marketing ads, but they have three social media accounts:

,

, and

. As previously mentioned, they have been suspended from Twitter and I hope someone at DadBrandApparel sends me a note to tell me why ... and why they still link to it form their website because, well, that’s weird.

They are running social ads, and I have included 3 here for your review and inspiration. You can see how for some of their social ads they are copying the meme format and style.

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