CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2228

Catching Some Rays … on Shopify

Yo -

I need some sympathy from you people.

I did something truly painful again this week. I keep doing it over and over again and it’s kicking my butt. Used to be I could do it and not even break a sweat. Used to be a piece of cake. I could do it twice on a weekend, no problem. But those days are long over now. Now even doing it half-way just hurts.

I filled up the truck with gas.

Holy mother’s crumb-cake … it wasn’t even below a quarter tank and it cost me over a hundred bucks to fill ‘er up!

When I swiped my credit card I heard a faint scream … as if the plastic itself suffered.

My bank statement arrived in a sympathy card.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Saudi Arabia, a sheik decided to buy a matching Bentley for his mistress.

If this goes on much longer it’s gonna bite into my chicken nugget budget.

For a split second I wondered how bad it would be if I sold the truck and lived out in the woods off the grid with the bears. Then I remembered that bears eat people and I like the powered conveniences of modern civilization … you know, things like showers and cooked food and air conditioning and streaming YouTube videos.

Somehow I think that we should all still be able to afford that stuff without taking on a second job.

But while I was applying burn cream to my wallet, I thought I would see if there were any Shopify stores that “lived off the grid.” Turns out there are a bunch of them, and some are making bank.

Let’s take a look at this week’s Shopify teardown target.

Happy Selling,

Zach

We can bring the heat 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: Gosun.co

Gosun was founded in 2014 in Cincinnati, Ohio, by Patrick Sherwin. The company was small and struggling for a few years. Product development accelerated when they raised more than $1 million in a crowdfunding campaign. They are currently on track to do nearly $6 million in sales this year and have a

going to raise more capital from investors to expand.

The core products all revolve around solar energy, solar cooking, portable water purification, and related products. They are the 2747

highest volume site on Shopify at the moment.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

As I just mentioned, Gosun is doing nearly $6 million per year in sales — managing it all from a nice $300 premium theme. It’s the Focal theme from our friends at Maestrooo and you can

.

What They Do Well

The product pages are extensive.

. Tons of images and details, good PR reviews, social proof … they spent a lot of time on them and it works. The higher a product's price and the more narrow the audience the more this kind of product page detail helps.

Also on that product page did you notice that the PayPal button for Express checkout and payment is right there? Customers do not even have to start checkout to start spending. This really works. They have other payment options in the process, and even offer installment payment through ShopPay. I’ll bet all this reduced friction improves conversions for them nicely.

If you

about halfway you will see a full-span image of a nice lady cooking in the jungle and happily using one of Gosun’s solar ovens. If you look carefully the products in the picture have hot spots that are clickable so you can shop from the image. This is very cool. BUT …

What Needs to Be Improved

… OK …this is technically not a part of this site teardown, but little things like this jump out at me sometimes and I cannot NOT see it. That cool “shop-able” image I just told you about?. The nice lady is using the solar oven and solar table … in the shade.

The shopping cart button is hard to see and does not look like a cart .. or a bag … what the heck is that thing?

There is some kind of content loading from Shopify CDN that is eating them alive. This one piece of content takes 2.2 second to resolve and is block other loads. Note to Gosun … get a task started with us and our team will solve this for you in less than 2 hours. You will thank us for it.

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.

  • Vidual Website Optimizer — Basically A/B testing.

  • Attentive — Mobile messaging.

  • Zendesk — Customer support.

  • Searchanise — eCommerce search.

  • Tone — AI-enhances blah blah blah … basically a chatbot.

  • OptinMonster — Opt-in forms app.

  • Stamped — User ratings and reviews.

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

  • PayPal/ShopifyPay/ApplePay/AmazonPay — Express payment options.

  • Boomerang — Website performance.

There are a few more hidden apps in there. But there is not app overload.

Marketing Stuff They Do

Gosun is building a

– including registered dealers, affiliate marketing, and what they call “Ambassadors” which are just another kind of affiliate. They also have a

and, of course, their Shopify site. They also do email marketing and paid search — which seems entirely focused at the moment on their solar over products. That’s a full docket of channels.

You know what is kind of odd? I did not see any social media links on their website. But I could search and find them. They have

,

,

,

, and YouTube. But … why not link to those pages? They have organic posts and are running social ads as well.

I will say this … their twitter account is “Temporarily Restricted” (uh oh) and their YouTube page used to exist, but now resolves to a 404 error (double uh oh).

Anyway … below you will find 3 currently-running social ads and 3 paid search ads for your inspiration and entertainment.

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