CheckoutWeekly/TaskHusky Curated Newsletter #2239

Take’in It to the Hole … with Shopify

Yo - 

You know what I just realized? It’s October. We’re gonna talk about the upcoming Black Friday crap in a minute. First, I want to whine about sports.

You know what happened last Friday? I’ll tell you what happened last Friday … the NBA pre-season kicked off and the regular season games start in just 2 weeks.

Didn’t we just like finish the NBA finals a few weeks ago? What the H - E - double hockey-sticks is going on here? I didn’t believe my eyes. From the pre-season games starting on September 30 through the anticipated Finals and on to the NBA Draft on June 22, the ONLY months without professional basketball are July and August. That’s 10 months of professional B-ball.

Heck … even soccer only lasts 8 months, it just feels like 12.

TaskHusky is based in Michigan, which means that when it comes to basketball you either root for the Detroit Pistons or you leave. They passed a law or something. In a few days the Detroit Pistons play against the New Orleans Pelicans.

If you think the name “Pelicans” is an odd name for a professional sports team, you are, of course, correct.

Detroit is “Motor City” so the name “Pistons” makes sense. The city of New Orleans NBA team used to have the name “Jazz” before someone moved the team to Utah … which makes sense given Salt Lake City’s historic reputation as a bastion of Jazz music … not.

Shouldn’t you have to give up the name “Jazz” when you leave New Orleans? It just seems like the Big Easy should be able to keep the name. Maybe rename the Utah team the “Snowboarders” or “The Saltines” or something.

But let’s say you’re New Orleans and you lose the perfect name because some team owner is a jerk and have to settle. Do you choose The Pelicans?

No … no you do not.

You become the Frenchmen or The Bourbons or the Cajuns or … heck, even name yourself after that tasty little fried donut hole thing you can get from street vendors there. I can see it now, The New Orleans Beignets. Or what about naming your team after those amazing nutty-chocolate-caramel candies from the French Quarter … become The New Orleans Pralines. Heck, that even rhymes! The stadium vendors would sell out every game.

Pelicans? … sheesh. I don’t think so.

Anyway … I guess it’s basketball season again.

But where the pro basketball season runs for 10 months, peak online selling season only last for 2, and it’s coming up fast.

The 4 days of eCommerce bacchanalia that is Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday (BFCM) are now officially only 7 weeks away people!

If you need something tweaked, installed, updated, or otherwise coded on your Shopify site before the quartet of big-sales days, do it now. Once we get into November the team of TaskHusky coding hamsters will be running around their little wheels of cyberspace like crazy and you don’t want to run out of time.

Literally a million Shopify sites will be gearing up for the holidays. And a few thousand of them will be selling basketball gifts, gear, and accessories. Let’s meet one of them.

Happy Selling,

Zach

If you have a Shopify site and want that site to be 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: BucketsBrand.com

At TaskHusky, we help and support the big Shopify stores as well as the little ones. And we do the same thing here in the newsletter. That’s because there are things to learn from both. BucketBrands is a smaller Shopify store – our analytics suggest that they are on track to break $100k in revenue this year. But with the modestly successful number, you might be wondering where this places BucketBrands in the ranking?

that Shopify has nearly 4 million stores right now. And since BucketBrands just cracked the top 400k Shopify sites in volume, that means that they are in the top 10%.

Looks like they launched their site in 2017 — so happy t5th Birthday on them. But they started social media in 2012, which probably means that they started really small without an online store for a few years. And I have to tell you, I kinda like these guys’ style. The sites is clean and seems to be updated. Looks like a successful side hustle. I personally wish them growth and success.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

The site is built on the Vantage theme from We Are Underground. One of the best things about this theme is that it is designed to scale up and down for large and small catalogs without slowing down.

You can have a

.

What They Do Well

If you have been a consistent reader of this newsletter … and why wouldn’t you be … then you know that I occasionally rant and rave about trust badges and risk reversal and how everyone forgets it and yadda yadda yadda. This guys did NOT forget it, and they do an excellent job. Take a look at this product page and scroll down just below the description. See all those clever, themed symbols about quality and shipping, and such? They are soooooo on-brand and make you want to look. Nice Job guys.

See the

? It’s all business, baby! They know that you are here to shop for basketball gear and they get right to the point. All the other stuff can be found in the footer.

What Needs to Be Improved

In addition to helping with Shopify website development projects, we do a LOT of marketing consultations too. So, my first critique is related to marketing and branding. They are selling several items that are labeled as “BCKTS Brand” instead of “Buckets Brand.”

Since the word “brand” is actually in their name, allow me to ironically point out that not only does this dilute the brand, but they do not even own the domain “BCKTSbrand.com” which they absolutely should. How do I know that they do not own that domain? Because I could have bought it for less than $10 at GoDaddy.

Note to ALL Shopify merchants: Do NOT dilute your brand and buy all related .com domains that you can.

Scroll all the way down to the

. See all those little payment and credit card icons on the bottom right side? Does ANYONE think displaying these makes a difference? Let me tell you what makes a difference … loading all those useless images that no one ever sees that delays product image loads and makes the page as a whole load slower … that makes a difference. Do not so this.

The Shopify Apps They Use

If you see an app or widget on their site that you like, you might be able to identify the specific tool they are using here in this section. We used our top-secret Shopify scanning tools to determine that this site is using the following apps and plugins:

  • Bold Commerce — Marketing suite

  • Klaviyo — Automated marketing and customer lifecycle management.

  • Woohoo — Customer lifecycle management.

  • Optimonk — Retargeting.

  • Lucky Orange — Real time user analytics.

  • Tidio — Live chat.

  • Elfsight — Social media widget.

  • Zipify — Upsell app.

  • Bugsnag — The snagger of bugs of the coding kind.

  • Judge Me — Customer reviews.

  • AfterPay — Installment payment option.

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

That’s not “too many” apps.

Marketing Stuff They Do

StormRides has middling-active social accounts on

,

, and

. When I was checking things out they were not posting too frequently, but they had some content there.

I was expecting to find an active affiliate program and was surprised when I didn’t. seems that this would be a natural.

In addition to SEO, what they are doing … a LOT of … is advertising. I found a lot of Facebook ads and search ads. Here are three recent examples of each for your inspiration.

Sponsored

Let us help you make your Shopify site get some hang time. If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.