CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2233 (missed one)

Back to School … with Shopify

Yo -

For the last few months, driving in and around our little slice of paradise in semi-rural Michigan has been a breeze.

But that’s all about to end.

When school is out, I can drive about in the morning with carefree abandon. But this week is the start of the school year in most Michigan school districts. That means that starting this Thursday, August 25

, stressed mothers will be yelling at their kids in the backseat and spilling Starbucks cups on their laps as they weave in and out of traffic.

By the High School, all the kids who turned 16 over the summer break will be driving to school too fast and sprint-car racing to McDonalds during lunch. The fact that they binge-watched the entire Fast and Furious film franchise last week does not help matters.

And don’t get me started on the busses! The local bus driver has it out for me personally … flicking out that binking red stop sign whenever he sees my truck.

I can hear him laughing.

NEVER trust a laughing school bus driver.

And what’s the deal with starting on a Thursday? That makes no sense at all. They go to school for 2 days, then have the weekend off. They go to school for 5 days and then have the long Labor Day weekend. The little rug rats have been swiping through TikTok videos and playing MineCraft for 2 months straight, what do they need a break for? It’s like the school district is trying to break them into the school year slowly. Like they would get some deep sea decompression sickness if they started learning again too quickly.

The whole thing makes me want to stand out front in my underwear and shout,

“Get off my lawn!”

But ever since last year there is some kind of a court order of something … so I can’t.

I’m just glad I don’t live in a college town. This time of the year, the air on campus is filled with the

unmistakable scent of testosterone and ignorance

. Speaking of fraternities and puberty, there are a bunch of Shopify stores that make their living off of frat-boys and jocks. Let’s meet one of them.

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. 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: CampusProtein.com

It can be scary how spot-on good a guesser I can be.

So, the Founder and CEO of CampusProtein is Russell Saks. On Russell’s LinkedIn profile he lists one of his jobs as “Chapter Treasurer of Delta Tau Delta Fraternity.”

Ironic.

Anyway, I am, of course, just teasing. Anyone who builds a company up to millions of dollars per year deserves respect. And Russell Saks has done just that. He founded CampusProtein in 2010 while still in college. We found

suggesting that after peaking at about $10 million in sales in 2018 they are trending toward $6.7 million this year. Of course, we have no idea what their actual sales numbers are. Automated reports collect analytics and traffic stats and take an educated guess. But another set of analytics suggests that the site had about 73,000 visits in June, so $6 million per year is plausible.

We’ll discuss the traffic sources in the Marketing section below.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

For a company selling food snacks to frat boys of marginal health benefit, they are smart enough to use a high-quality premium theme from our friends at Archetype Themes. This one is the Impulse theme — a perennial favorite.

You can

.

What They Do Well

On their core products they have decent text descriptions and SEO … see the marketing section below. That’s why it’s working.

Their product reviews app is working nicely, and they have plenty of reviews. This looks good on them. They’ve obviously worked hard on those.

Solid risk reduction and risk reversal deployments. Dig the understated trust badges.

The shopping cart is fast and logical. Upsells work technically, but the items being upsold seem not aligned with the products being purchased.

I like their choice on the main menu — especially the “Top 25” which lists the top sellers … at least, theoretically. It was interesting enough to make me click.

Strong email subscription CTA offer … 20% off is a strong incentive.

What Needs to Be Improved

The code is ugly … the site runs slow … they’re breaking all the rules … Basically their Shopify code is like early Monday chemistry lab after a frat party. But they are doing $6 million, so they will not believe me when I tell them that they could do better. They should, but they won’t.

Someone is not paying attention. They have only 2 images in their Hero header and on one of them the image is not responsive. It gets cut-off in strange places and is often unseeable.

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.

  • Nosto — Personalized shopping experiences.

  • Hotjar — User heatmap analytics.

  • Mixpanel — Conversion optimization.

  • Attentive — Mobile messaging platform.

  • AudioEye — Website accessibility.

  • GetEmails — Uses sneaky stuff to capture email addresses from anonymous site visitors.

  • Riskified — Fraud and Chargeback prevention.

  • Tapfiliate— Affiliate marketing and tracking.

  • Smile IO — Loyalty programs.

  • Searchanise — eComm website search.

  • VerifyPass — Discount verification.

  • Yotpo — Social reviews.

  • FastClick — removes double click delays.

  • PhotoSwipe — JavaScript image gallery.

  • Signified — another froud prevention app?

  • AfterPay — Installment payment options.

  • Klarna — Mobile device payments.

  • PayPal/ApplePay — Express payment options.

  • ReturnGo — Returns and Exchange management.

  • Doubleclick — Ad network.

Well … that’s too many apps. And some of them are duplicated functions.

Marketing Stuff They Do

So … CampusProtein has ~73k visitors in June. But where did that traffic come from?

80% was from inside the United States — makes sense. But importantly 30% was direct navigation. That means repeat visitors and customers. 54% was from search, so this is the biggest driver by far. Social media accounted for just 3%, which is less than I expected. Paid referrals was also 3%, and other traffic referrals was about 10%.

We found one search ad campaign, which you can see below. And they have 18 ads currently running on Facebook and 18 reformatted ads running on Instagram. You can see the 3 most current Facebook ads below for your inspiration.

They also use college students to “rep” their products on campus. They have an active program that is well-defined and thought-out. This is a natural marketing channel for this brand … most can’t take advantage of it.

.

Sponsored

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