CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2227

Pizza, how do we love thee … on Shopify

Yo - 

My love for the crispy bits of pseudo-poultry-like product we call "chicken nuggets" knows no bounds. If you are a regular reader of this weekly tome you understand of what I speak. But if I had to pick my second fav food in the entire world it would be pizza. In fact, here at the office on nights when working late with the team we have been known to get a jumbo box of chicken nuggets AND a pepperoni pizza pie to eat side-by-side.

Don’t knock it ‘til you try it.

Anyway … we humans have been adding ingredients to flatbread and toasting them up since the dawn of time. There was some fossilized flavored flatbread found in Sardinia from more than 9000 years ago. Persian soldiers serving under Darius the Great of the Achaemenid Empire in 600 BC used to cook flatbread topped with cheeses and dates on their round shields … sounds like pizza to me.

The word “pizzarelle” referred to a kind of flatbread eaten by Roman Jews during Passover and Roman soldiers had been adding cheese and olive oil to it for literally centuries. The first documented use of the word “pizza” comes from more than 1000 years ago. Back in 997 AD some Italian chef in the Middle Ages wrote down a recipe.

Anyway … pizza is wonderful in all of its forms. Except for Hawaiian. 

They call in “Hawaiian” ‘cuz of the pineapple. What kind of communist social subversion is that? It also has Canadian bacon on it but they don’t call it “Canadian pizza” do they? It was invented by a Greek immigrant named Sam Panopoulos … in freak’in Canada. And in case you need to be reminded, “Canadian bacon” is NOT bacon. So-called “Canadian bacon” is a processed ham-like object … it’s almost Spam for goodness sake.

You could put real bacon on a round slab of cardboard and I’d probably eat it and ask for seconds. 

So, anyway … I like pizza. I like it a lot. And since we are too far into this week’s email to change direction now, let’s talk about a super-successful Shopify store that sells portable pizza ovens so that you can cook ‘em at home.

I’m going to order up a pizza and see if I can finish writing this email before the delivery guy shows up.

Happy Selling,

Zach

We can get you a heaping helping of spicy cheesy 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 Targe

Ooni makes pizza ovens … and these babies are works of art designed to heat up fast and properly cook up your picturesque pizza prizes in literally 1 or 2 minutes. The first Ooni pizza oven was invented by Kristian Tapaninaho in 2012. He and his wife Darina Garland used a Kickstarter campaign to get their first product developed. 

Originally, they sold only through retail resellers. But now their largest outlet is online eCommerce. They came to Shopify in 2018 and upgraded to Shopify Plus in 2020. Estimated sales online are more than $3 million per month.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

Here we have another super-successful Shopify store kicking out millions of dollars per year in sales using a normal premium theme that you could buy now for your site. Sure, they have some extra apps and customization tweaks. But you can have those too. That’s the point ... heck, that's the TaskHusky business model.

If you want to check out the Empire theme from our good buds at Pixel Union, 

. And Ooni.com is using the “Graphic” version … get it for yourself and get going.

What They Do Well

The photography and video snips are like food porn.

In all seriousness … here’s the thing … I can ALWAYS tell if a merchant really likes their products. It comes through. When a merchant doesn’t care or only sort of cares about the stuff they sell, images and descriptions are lifeless. They are phoning it in. They pay for ad copy and can’t tell if it’s good ad copy or bad ad copy because they are unmoved by the stuff they are selling. Worse, they pander to the audience, saying things they think customers want to hear.

If you LOVE your products, you know what every image should make you feel like, you understand the words that describe those feelings. You get everything else out of the way.

So … I ask you. Take one hard look at the Ooni.com site again. Tell me …do these people love their pizza ovens and the pizzas that are made in them?

Yes … yes they do.

I will leave you to click around a little bit for yourself. You know I’m right. And that energy comes through in every image and word. It’s a kind of sales and market magic that there is no substitute for.

What Needs to Be Improved

You know, the stats tell me that the site is loading slow. But I ran a bunch of user experience tests and I do not see the flaws. I think that this is one of those times when the automated tools are measuring things that just do not really matter.

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:

  • Bold Commerce — Conversion optimization.

  • Klaviyo — Customer lifecycle management.

  • Hotjar — User heatmaps.

  • FullStory — User ecperience support.

  • Bazaarvoice — User community development.

  • Automizely — Traffic and sales optimization.

  • Back in Stock — Inventory alerts.

  • Pixlee — User-generate image content.

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

  • Yotpo — Customer review widget.

  • Tawk.to — Online chat.

  • PayPal/ShopifyPay/ApplePay — Express payment options.

  • DoubleClick — Ad network.

  • Klarna — Installment payments.

That’s only 14 apps. I expected more from a site doing this kind of volume. Nice work.

Marketing Stuff They Do

These guys are doing tons of marketing. They have a full boat of social media presences with loads of organic content and tons of follows — including 

, 

, 

, 

, 

, and even 

. They also sell through stocking dealer-distributors, have an active affiliate program, do a great job with SEO, AND have a super-active paid ad campaign on search and social. In short, they are going it all and doing it all rather well.

Here are 3 search ads and 3 social ads running now, but there a literally dozens we could have chosen from.

Sponsored

Let us help you heat things up. If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.