CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2236

Living the Fantasy … with Shopify

Yo -

If you have been a subscriber to this — your fav newsletter in the history of ever — for at least a year, then you know I am a football fan. I talk about sports quite a bit this time of the year. Mostly college ball, but all of it, really. Michigan State Spartans be my homies. And this last Sunday was the start of Professional NFL action.

And we already have our first football scandal of the year.

It wasn’t that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers trounced the Dallas Cowboys on their home field 19 – 3. No. The scandal that has all of football a twitter is that Tom Brady’s wife — uber-model Gisele Bündchen — did not show up at the game to support Tom.

I guess the two are

. And … well, Tom don’t want to.

Now, I know darn well not to take sides in a domestic spat. However … if I were married to Gisele and she wanted me to spend more time at home while she continued to earn a nine-figure uber-salary, I’d say,

“Sure thing babe … I’m happy to let you be my sugar-momma. Go do that sexy thing, pout for the camera, and grab us some more chips on the way home.”

But I ain’t Tom Brady.

To be clear, for 90%-plus of the football fans out there, Tom Brady is the destroyer of dreams. He’s Satan in shoulder pads. But even those that hate him with a passion that burns in a thousand suns recognize that — with 7 championships — he is likely the best quarterback ever. And at 45, he is certainly the oldest starting QB in NFL history, which kinda helps Gisele’s argument here.

Anyway … the point is that asking Tom Brady to NOT play football is like asking

NOT to cook. Like asking

to NOT sing country. Like asking me not to be charming and witty … or so I’ve been told. You get the idea … Brady gonna Brady.

All this got me wondering if there are any Shopify sites that specialize in football stuff. Thurns out that there are a LOT of them. Some “claim” to be about football, but are actually about soccer (don’t go there). But there are a bunch of Shopify sites that treat the start of the football season like it’s Christmas.

I even found one that is devoted to selling real stuff about “fantasy” football.

Let’s see if they drop the ball.

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: FantasyJocks.com

Fantasy football is BIG business these days. There are apps and leagues and all kinds of stuff. FantasyJocks was founded in 2016 to provide all the stuff you need to run a fantasy football league — including trophies and championship rings and a bunch of other cool fantasy things. An avid fantasy football afficionado, Dustin Remy was inspired to build his dream business while watching the game on TV, eating fish tacos, and drinking beer.

Sounds like my kind of guy.

Our analytics suggest that they pull in about $120k per month in sales — that’s a trend of nearly $1.5 million per year. And if that a fantasy, I’ll have as much of it as I can get. Want proof that they got game? Checkout the

. In the winter and spring they have been running 10k to 15k visitors per month. That number leaps this time of the year as the fantasy football leagues are getting stared for the season to more than 100k visitors per month.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

FantasyJocks has NOT wasted any money of a custom theme. Instead, they have knowingly or unknowingly followed my advice to by a high-quality premium theme from the Shopify store and then us apps judiciously and add tweaks to fix things up the way you want them over time.

In this case, FantasyJocks appears to be using the ShowTime theme from Mile High Themes as the base.

.

What They Do Well

In a world where Shopify entrepreneurs as faced with a million distractions, FantasyJocks has a core demographic and sticks to it like chewing gum on a bleacher seat.

The fact that the section in the website footer for Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and such was labeled “Legal Crap” fits perfectly into my sense of humor.

The site loads nice and fast (except the shopping cart, see below). The code meets or exceeds our best practices recommendations for performance. So these guys are not just phoning it in.

What Needs to Be Improved

See the product color selector on

? When you click on different colors it should show you a picture of that color combination. TONS of sites do this. Why not guys?

Wow … the shopping cart loads like crap. I did a few test purchases and each time the cart never fully loaded, and the express payment options were jumbled and trimmed. That’s a 15-yeard penalty for sure. This has got to costing them conversions.

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.

  • SEO Manager — SEO optimization.

  • Bugsnag — The snagger of bugs.

  • ApplePay/ShopPay/PayPal/AmazonPay — Express payments options.

  • Refersion — Affiliate marketing and tracking.

  • DoubleClick — Ad network.

Just like last week, someone here knows what the heck they are doing. Not too many apps, the code is clean. Always makes me happy when I see this stuff managed well.

Marketing Stuff They Do

FantasyJocks has an

. They also have established social media accounts on

,

,

, and

. But their products are both niche and seasonal. This is the perfect scenario of organic search value with not a lot of competition. Nearly 90% of all traffic comes from search.

They also do a smattering of paid search ads (3 examples below), but I couldn’t find any paid social ads running right now. This is odd to me because it seems like this would be the time of the year for them to run social media ads when they rule the social platforms.

Sponsored

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