CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2226

Keeping it Fresh … on Shopify

Yo -

I love holidays. All of ‘em.

Some people love holidays because they get time off work. Not me. I’m a tech entrepreneur in the Shopify service business … there are no days off. I love holidays because of the food. But it’s more than “just” the food. Laying out a feast and enjoying with family and friends … it’s the best.

But have you noticed that you can tell what holiday passed by the leftovers in the fridge?

Think about it. If you have a quarter corned beef brisket and ‘tater salad with a few pints of Guinness, then you probably just passed St. Patrick’s Day. If you have a Ziplock bag full of turkey, a dish of mashed yams, and a bowl of Aunt Joan’s Jell-O ambrosia … well, yesterday was Thanksgiving. A quarter box of See’s Candies and half a bottle of white wine means yesterday was Valentine’s Day.

I do not even have to look at my calendar today

… all I gotta do is look in the fridge. What do I have in there, you ask? In my chill-chest this morning I can see a rack of BBQ ribs, 5 cooked hamburger patties, half an apple pie, a tub of salsa fresca with no chips, and a tray of red-white-and-blue sugar cookies.

Yesterday was the 4

of July.

Even listing the leftovers … you know we had a good time. It also means that I’ll be feasting off these leftover morsels of festiveness for 3 or 4 days to come.

And as I gazed with culinary lust into the fridge wondering if eating half of an apple pie before 9 am qualifies as having “fruit for breakfast,” I was inspired in another way as well.

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

Happy Selling,

Zach

We can get you a heaping helping of tough love Shopify style. 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. 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: Tupperware.com 

Tupperware is named after its founder — Earl Tupper. Seriously … is there a more down-home Mayberry name than “Earl Tupper?” I think not. Anyway … Earl Tupper invented the flexible, food-safe plastic in 1938 and created his first, bell-shaped food container in 1942, He introduced the line for distribution sales in 1946. But sales were slow at best. The problem was that just setting Tupperware on the shelf was not enough. Having enough food around so that you needed to store it was new, let alone understanding his innovative storage solutions.

So, Earl innovated again. This time, he invented a new way to sell — multi-level marketing in home demonstrations hosted by local housewives. Thus, the Tupperware party was born.

Today Tupperware Brands is a $2.6 billion company selling world-wide. And when they decided to have an eCommerce presence they launched on Shopify.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

I think that this is a great … here you have a name-brand billion-dollar company using Shopify. Not only that, but they are using Shopify for several international online stores. And even better,

they are NOT using a fancy-schmancy custom theme

. The Tupperware site is built on the Vogue variant of the Prestige them from our friends at Maestrooo. They have paid for some upgrades and tweaks and enterprise integrations to keep things … ahem, fresh. But they know that they don’t need a 5 or 6-figure custom dev project to be successful, so good on them.

You can

if you want to see it.

What They Do Well

This site is beautiful. The images and design are very well balanced and puts forth the lifestyle brand-image that the marketing team is obviously going for.

Look at that main menu navigation. So simple and clean! You have “shop,” “recipes,” “host a party,” “join us,” and “do good.”

The product pages are clean too and have nice SEO.

What Needs to Be Improved

All those wonderful, professional images? They are not optimized for speed. Oh, the good fulks at Tupperware “think” that the images are optimized, but they are not. I can see how they tried and tried … but I have to think that they just didn’t know how. And this is a bit surprising considering the professionalism of the rest of the site. Let me give you an example … go to the home page here and scroll down to the full-span image of the nice lady eating lunch on a hike in the woods. See here? In about 2- minutes — no lie — I was able to cut that image by 54% in load AND make it look better at the same time.

Anyway … the site gets an “F” score on ALL the industry standard performance tools because things load too slowly AND because they do not load and process in the correct order.

I walked through the cart and checkout processes, and they are mostly fine … and by “fine” I mean they are default average. There are no express payment options, no upselling, and no trust reinforcement / risk reversal. How hard

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.

  • Pingdom RUM — User performance stats.

  • Optimonk — Retargeting platform.

  • Neat AB — You guessed it … A/B testing app.

  • Littledata — Google Analytics app.

  • LivePerson — Live chat.

  • Boost Commerce — Filtering and smart search for eCommerce.

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

  • AlsoBought – this is a product recommendations app, but I did not see it working in the wild. Maybe the code is there but the app is not fully deployed.

This may seem like a pretty-lean list, but there are some hidden apps and details here. The first is that we can detect Barracuda code … which is really odd. Why would the site have Barracuda code in it? Barracuda is an enterprise hardware solution for people with too much money to spend. Also, I can see that they have abstracted certain website functions off of the Shopify platform. It’s not fully “headless,” but there are some things running in other datacenters and it is slowing them down a bit.

Marketing Stuff They Do

As I mentioned above, Tupperware is doing some solid SEO work here. Of course, their bread and butter are the local hosts and the selling parties … you know, when your girlfriend comes home with $200 with of Bundt cake contains even though she has never EVER baked a Bundt cake before but promises that she will because ... you know, stuff.

The purchase a lot of search ads too and have an active retargeting ad campaign to haunt you forever online with banner ads featuring iced tea pitchers. Coupled with all that, they have active social media sites on

,

,

,

,

,

, and even

. Not sure how LinkedIn fits into a social media strategy for this housewares brand, but there you have it.

Interestingly, they analytics and Facebook’s page transparency reports say that Tupperware is NOT running any social media ads at the moment. And I, for one, find that exceptionally odd. Are they running directly through a private agency? They also have a placement tie-in with Amazon Prime Video and their Marvelous Ms. Marple series showing a classic Tupperware party from back in the day. I put a screen grab from the Amazon Prime promo at the bottom of this email so you can see it.

Anyway, below you will find 3 examples of search ads for your review and inspiration.

Sponsored

Let us help you make it the hit of the party. If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.