CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2229

Did Someone Say “Hot?” … on Shopify

Yo -

I’ve been on a bunch of conference calls with Shopify merchants and theme developers this week already and everyone is griping about the heat. I guess a lot of the East Coast, California, Texas, and in other places … well,

It’s been hot in much of Europe.

So, how hot is it?

It’s so hot … I saw two trees fighting over a dog.

It’s so hot … in Washington DC Congress installed a fan on the debt ceiling.

It’s so hot …Kanye West called ex-wife Kim Kardashian so he could get the cold shoulder.

It’s so hot … in Chicago the gangs are doing swim-bys.

It’s so hot … I left the seat up in the bathroom just to get an icy stare from my girlfriend.

It’s so hot … the chickens are laying omelets.

It’s so hot … I started listening to EMIMEM to get a little Slim Shady.

It’s so hot … I saw an Amish guy buying a black-market air conditioner.

Let’s take a mental cool-off and meet 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: WearIcy.com

Icy Vintage is a clothing brand founded in 2016 by

. Like a lot of young entrepreneurs, he started the business out of his dorm room as a side hustle while going to school. Based in Ontario, Canada, they sell a ton of 1-of-1-kind curated vintage clothing along with similarly-themed new product drops — most of which are push through social media for quick sale. This tactic adds urgency and exclusivity to their sales cycle. It’s hard to pull off, but when you do it right it can work great — especially for trendy fashion merchandise catering to the 19 to 30 crowd.

Current sales volume ranks them in the top 10% of Shopify stores at just over $150,000 per month or so. They have their Shopify site, a wholesale business, sell on social (a lot), and have their flagship physical location in Toronto.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

Icy Vintage is using a very popular theme called “Warehouse“ from our friends at Maestrooo. Looks like the “Fabric” version of that theme too, if I am not mistaken. You can click here if you want to

.

What They Do Well

Let’s start by giving some serious props. Fashion sites like this are notorious for loading slow. They merchants at these kinds of sites often load too many images and do nto take the time to properly format them for speed. And while we see a duplicated app (see below), the site code is pretty clean and loads fast. Nice job guys.

The site navigation is tight and crisp. See the main menu up top? They kept it tight and only listed the big stuff folks are looking for.

From the Home page you can search by size. This is pretty rare. But it makes sense for them since their clothing items are one-of-a-kind. It works well and is intuitive. A customer can click on their size and just see items that fit.

What Needs to Be Improved

The home page just looks clunky and amateurish. The hero images at the top do not scale or respond well on mobile. The gallery-like listing of products on the home pages is actually rather boring. Some of this is understandable because they literally sell a lot of 1-off apparel. It’s hard to keep up and scale good photos and design when selling single item SKUs.

Um …

makes no sense whatsoever.

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.

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

Tidio — Live Chat.

Shopify Inbox — another Live Chat tool.

Swym Wishlist Plus — Interactive wishlists.

POWr — Social media, galleries, and forms.

PayPal/ShopifyPay/ApplePay — Express payment options.

DoubleClick — Ad network.

This list looks REALLY small — normally this is a good thing. But I also see some hooks out to Microsoft Azure. This is a another cloud hosting service that Shopify does not use. I suspect that they are doing a hybrid “headless” website model. That means that some other apps and widgets are likely running in another environment that our 007 James Bond-level analytics tools can’t see through at the moment.

Marketing Stuff They Do

Icy Vintage sells and advertises a lot of social media. But they keep it tight with only 3 social platforms —

,

, and

. Most of what they do on social is organic posting. It’s a lot of extra work, but it feels more authentic to their audience. In fact, I was able to locate only a single social media ad currently running, and it has been running for 2 months. You can see it below.

Likewise, I was only able to find a single paid search ad running now too. This seems odd, but it could be that the ads are running through a 3

party or – more likely – through a series of social influencers.

Sponsored

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