How much wood? … on Shopify

How much wood? … on Shopify

Yo -

Sometimes stuff just lines up. Let me give you an example.

So, the other day I was talking to a guy at the bowling alley about that Bill Murray film called “Groundhog Day.” That’s the film where he keeps reliving the same day over and over again until he gets it right.

? Great film.

Then, yesterday I’m talking to a completely different person at McDonalds and we are doing tongue-twisters … you know, those sayings that are hard to say correctly. Like, “She sells seashells by the sea shore.” And then I come up with the classic: “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

Anyway … did you know that a woodchuck and a groundhog are the exact same thing? Why do we do that … I mean, why do we have two completely different words for the exact same animal. We didn’t do that with the tiger … no confusion there. If you were standing in the jungles of southeast Asia and I yelled “Tiger!” you would immediately jump into a martial arts pose … because tigers like to eat karate guys more than regular people. But the point is that you would know exactly what was about to eat you.

But if you were standing in a filed in Pennsylvania and I yelled “Woodchuck! You might not realize the imminent danger because you think it’s a groundhog.

Hey … don’t laugh. Groundhog-chuckleheads might have rabies or something. But that’s not the point.

So anyway … then I realized that next week is Groundhog Day where when a bunch of folks in Punxsutawney, PA wear big hats and old-timey suits and pull a poor rabies-infested groundhog out of his den to predict the weather … which is the setting for the Bill Murray film.

See how this all comes together?

And with all this synchronicity, I thought maybe … just maybe … there was a Shopifytie-in as well. Turns out there is.

Let’s do this.

Happy Selling,

Zach

Speaking of smiling ... if you are a Shopify merchant, you are interested in customer loyalty. It's cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one. So, let's keep this customers people!

I hear that woodchucks are pretty loyal.

Anyway ...

is the leading Shopify app for customer loyalty and you should take a look.

This Week’s Shopify Business Teardown Target: WoodchuckUSA.com

Imagine my surprise when a completely rando search turns up a Shopify site. I simply HAD to take a look … obviously the universe demands it. And you don’t want to screw around with the universe.

WoodchuckUSA is an eCommerce merchant based in Saint Paul, MN. They sell a range of stuff … you guessed it … made out of wood. The company was founded back in 2013 in a college dorm room. Now they have their eCommerce business, of course, but they also sell

all across the USA and manufacture custom corporate gifts and such too.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

The WoodchuckUSA site looks rather calm and sedate on the surface, but they do a lot of customized products as well. The means there is some serious code-monkey stuff going on in the background. So, they went to our friend Kurt Elster and his team at

for a custom site.

What They Do Well

When you look at the site, it sort of looks like a standard, but solid, eCommerce website. And there is nothing wrong with that. Just the opposite, in fact. The site is clean and functional and well-tuned for conversions without feeling junky and crowed. That’s hard to do than it sounds. And it’s no rocket ship, but it loads reasonably fast when you consider all of the customization and purpose-built code going on inside.

All this means that the site is easy to navigate and easy for the customer to understand. That’s a win.

Part of the complexity is that they have an environmental ethos. They call it “But One Plant One.” Kind of like Toms Shoes and their shoe charity program, but for wood and trees and … well, I assume woodchucks as well. They have a tool that lets shoppers engage with the tree-planting program and “

.” Doing a locator like that took some work.

What Needs to Be Improved

My quibbles with the site are just a few. NORMALLY I would quibble about the placement of the About Us link in the main navigation top menu. But this is a bit of an exception because the “buy one plant one” story is an integral part of their audience messaging and … theoretically … might boost conversions. So the About Us stuff belongs up front on this site.

A few of the images are oversized …

. I saw about a half dozen like this that are slowing things down. That should be an easy fix. If you work at Woodchuck, give us a call and we’ll help you out. But in the green ad strip for this tool on the home page, the two CTA buttons are jammed together. Need to give these things a little breathing room guys.

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:

  • Klaviyo — Customer lifecycle management.

  • Hubspot — Inbound marketing.

  • Lucky Orange — Real time analytics and heatmaps.

  • JustUno — Social media marketing.

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

  • Stamped — Ratings and reviews.

  • Yotpo — The hunter of yots and pos … and social media reviews.

  • PayPal/ApplePay/Venmo — Express payment options.

  • Wistia — Video content marketing.

  • DoubleClick — Ad network.

That’s not too many apps, and fewer than I expected, quite frankly. And those are serious apps that are major players in their spaces.

Marketing Stuff They Do

WoodchuckUSA has

,

, and

social pages. They are fairly well-crafted with a marginal amount of organic activity (should be more active). But I do not see any social media advertising right now … or even in the last few months. This seems odd to me since their products are so visual and probably would do well during the holidays as gifts.

I do see some paid search ads, and 3 samples are below for your inspiration.

Sponsored

Let us help knot be a sap. If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.