Beware the Ides of Shopify!

Beware the Ides of Shopify!

Yo -

Can you believe that we’re in March already?

Each year it seems like time passes faster and faster as it is. Then February comes up short on the number of days and messes with my head … as if there was enough to mess with there in the first place.

28 days … that’s like a 10% discount off a “real” month. What the heck? Why would anyone do that?

Turns out that the ancient’s calendar used to wobble .. a lot. Those toga-wearing old-timers would strut around with all their conquering and empire-building and gladiator-ing using a 10-month-long year. Makes sense … sure, but at the same time those heathen Persians and Babylonians were using a base 12 system, but the high-cultured Romans loved ‘em some base-10 math, and thus brute-forced 10 months into the year.

But then along came

. He was King of Rome 2700-freak’in years ago, so technically he was not “Caesar” because they didn’t have Caesars yet. But that’s the way to think about him … a Caesar-like object. Anyway … Numa said something like, “Yo, homies! This calendar sucks.”

OK … I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like that. I like to imagine him sounding like an early Keanu Reeves. Anyway ….

Ever wonder why “sept” means 7 but September is the 9

month? Same with “oct” and October … November and December too. It’s because ‘Old King Pomp-his-ass randomly bolted two additional months in the beginning of the year. Yep … he totally invented January and February because he was King and that was reason enough for him, evidently.

Of course, he did sort of have a good reason to do it. You see, there are – roughly – twelve lunar cycles per year and he thought it would be easier for farming and sailoring and all that empire-building if you could just look up at the sky and sort of figure out the tides and seasons and such (4 seasons divides evenly into 12). But back then they had calculated the days of the year a bit wrong and then they shifted it all around trying to make the best of an awkward thing and then some people were superstitious about the number of days in the months so they moved ‘em again.

It was a big mess.

Long story short, there had to be at least one month that got the short end. So, since their festivals for the dead and other rather unlucky things occurred in the newly organized February, they shorted their unluckiest month on purpose.

Of course, in the ensuing centuries Roman Caesars would do some rather questionable things that made the whole calendar-changing episode look positively sane and level-headed by comparison, so let’s not give King Pomp-goes-the-weasel too hard of a time over it.

They should produce a show called “Keeping Up with the Caesars” … it would be just like “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” … you know, with just as much orgy bacchanalia (raging sex parties Roman style), but instead of sibling arguments over lip gloss they fight over who gets to have a pillow fight with the palace eunuchs, feeding dissidents to lions, and the occasional patricide. But I digress.

And it seems appropriate that we are mentioning the Crazy Caesars, since we are coming up on the Ides of March in a few weeks — a dangerous time to be Caesar (

).

What was I talking about? Oh yes … Caesar. Well, I found a Shopify site to review whose motto should be “

Render unto Caesar to buy shoes

.” Let’s have a look.

Happy Selling,

Zach

OK, check this out. We found a Shopify app that lets you talk to your customers.

I am not saying "talk" as in a metaphor ... I am saying it lets you actually "talk" to them with audio.

What you say to them? That's up to you, but I would say something nice about their hair ... everyone likes to hear that their hair looks good.

This Week’s Shopify Business Teardown

Target:

CasesarWalks launched their Shopify store in 2018. I notice that there is no “About Us” page at all, and there is precious little other information about the company online. They sell some products on Amazon, but do not have a formal Amazon storefront. The analytics tools suggest that they are on track to pull down about $400k through their Shopify site this year … maybe a little more. We don’t know how successful the Amazon efforts are (

), but Amazon hasn’t completely knocked off their products yet, so all we can say is “not enough Amazon sales to get noticed by Jeff Bezos yet.”

But there is something wrong here. Selection and inventory are down and they are dropping in the Shopify rankings. Two years ago they were in the top 5% of Shopify sites, now they are ranked in the 20%-ish range. But they dropped off last year at this same time, so maybe it’s a seasonal thing for them.

Check out the Marketing section below for other thing that make me wrinkle my forehead in doubt.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

CaesarWalks is using a customized version of the Blockshop theme from Troop Themes, in this case it appears to be the “Deli” variant of that theme. This theme retails for $320 on the Shopify Theme Store and seems to work well for them.

You can

.

What They Do Well

The site looks super cool and fashionable. Their target audience arrives and KNOWS that they are the “right” place. They get high points for style.

This site is a rocket-ship of speed. Somebody has invested a lot of time making this load very fast … it has some of the best scores I’ve ever seen. And do you see all those

? They have been optimized to a razor’s edge.

The product pages are clean and work well on mobile devices (super important) but they are a bit boring.

What Needs to Be Improved

The main menu navigation ... why would you have a drop-down with a single item in it? Maybe there’s something I don’t know, but that just seems lazy. And no one lists “Home” in a menu nav anymore because EVERYONE knows that the logo is a link.

The

… is it even possible to do this worse? Notice the text borders do not exist and the contact form does not load. They just broke it and haven’t noticed yet.

The checkout process is fairly average, but the express payments options load slow and seem to pop into existence randomly. This is actually a very common issue that we see. A little code tweak makes this problem go away.

Zachometer Score

Aside from this, things are good. So, I’ll give them a

Zachometer Score of 7.0 out of 10.

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:

  • Stamped — Ratings and reviews.

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

  • PayPal/ApplePay/AmazonPay — Express payment options.

  • AfterPay — Installment payment option.

  • MailChimp — They’ve hooked in MailChimp on their own

That’s it … nothing more. No marketing automation, no fancy rewards app, no nothing. This is either a sign of intentional code discipline or neglect. So, read on to the Marketing stuff below.

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Marketing Stuff They Do

There is something they are doing that appears to be hiding traffic data, so it’s hard to source info.

We do know that they have a

,

, and

(their top social page). But this social stuff is the very definition of neglect. The top posts are a year old.

And I could find zero paid search ads. How are they making money?

As I said earlier, this could be a seasonal thing. They were VERY low traffic at this time last year. Maybe they retool and get new styles during Q1 and make all their cash in Q2 through Q4?

But this means we have no social or search ads to show you this week. So here is an entertaining GIF of the Little Caesars pizza guy for your entertainment.

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