The Sweetness of Success … on Shopify

The Sweetness of Success … on Shopify

Yo -  

Greeting Shopifiers!

I’m in a weird mood today. Just get that way sometimes. How are you doing? 

We’re in that strange holiday zone between Saint Pat’s and Easter. It’s strange for everyone. I went into the grocery store the other day and they had the little bags of chocolate coins and leftover shamrock cookies still on display next to the Lindt chocolate bunnies and Marshmallow Peeps. It’s enough to give you holiday whiplash.

Which reminds me … what’s the proper beer pairing with Marshmallow Peeps? Some might opt for a wine pairing … perhaps a Prosecco. But I’m thinking that the bitterness of a Dark Irish Stout might go well with the FD&C yellow food dye and gooey manufactured styrene matrix in a Peep. But that’s just me. I’m certain that you could drink Budweiser with your Peeps whilst hanging with your peeps and no one would judge you. 

Well, that’s not true … I’d judge you a little. I’d still love you though.

Anyway … We all know what beer is made of … grain, hops, yeast, water, and magic. But do you know what Marshmallow Peeps are made of? I didn’t either, so I looked it up. Turns out Peeps are made from sugar, corn syrup, gelatin, food dyes, salt, and the Dark Side of the Force. And you will be happy to know that there are zero vitamins and no dietary fiber whatsoever. You might as well take out a new life-insurance policy and inject sucrose directly into your veins.

If Red Bull gives you wings, free-basing Marshmallow Peeps will trip you into a weeks-long sugar coma where you will meet the “other you” from a parallel dimension.

Or so I’ve been told.

Anyway … I warned you that I was in a strange mood today.

And due to my natural, pathological curiosity, I was curious if any Shopify site actually sells Marshmallow Peeps. I found 8 of them. Let’s have a look at one, shall we?

Happy Selling,

Zach

This is a cool app. It helps you use email and SMS to get customers and visitors from the past and bring them into the present.

It's like Back to the Future, but for Shopify stores.

This Week’s Shopify Business Teardown

Target: OldTimeCandy.com 

The first thing that you need to know is that OldTimeCandy sells 

. The second thing you need to know is that they sell a freakin’ lot of candy … something like $2.5 million per year through their Shopify store. They are in the top 2000 eCommerce stores and a top 700 Shopify merchant. And that’s not b ad for a handful of employees working in Ohio. But they probably have rather tight margins. Still, seems like a good business and the domain name “OldTimeCandy.com” is a marketing team’s dream.

Karen and Donny Ray founded their Candy-commerce empire in 2000 … just before the dot-com bubble burst. Good timing guys. Anyway … they survived that and have grown and expanded to their present business sweetness.

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 This multi-million dollar tooth-decay operation is based entirely on a simple Shopify theme — appropriately enough, the Taste Theme. 

.

What They Do Well

The site is simple and clean. It gets immediately down to business with no muss or fuss. 

 … love it. Equal parts clever and easy to find what you want to. 

Everything is friendly and on-brand. 

The product pages are clean and trim as well, but you have everything you need right there …. Reviews, good SEO, social proof and more. 

. You can keep it clean like this when you have a clear brand and mission and product.

The site even runs fast … good job guys.

What Needs to Be Improved

Here’s the problem … I love this site. All the products are filled with nostalgia. They do not need to over-sell their customers because all those childhood memories came flooding back. 

I think that the only thing I would do is make the social proof easier to find and tie in some other nostalgia images from TV show and such for each generation of candy that they provide. But this is a small marketing and messaging tweak.

Zachometer Score

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

Zachometer Score of 9.1 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:

  • Spring Metrics — Conversion optimization.

  • Nextopia — Site search (works really well).

  • Hotjar — Customer heatmap analytics.

  • 4-Tell — Personalized eCommerce experiences.

  • Klaviyo — Customer lifecycle management.

  • Marsello Abandoned Cart Recovery — Just what the name implies.

  • Spin a Sale — Pop-up lead generation.

  • Customily — Shopping personalization.

  • RevLifter — Marketing and personalization (more personalization?).

  • Crazy Egg — Use visit visualization.

  • Back in Stock — Inventory alerts.

  • SearchSpring — Search and Navigation.

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

  • Webmarked — eCommerce wishlists.

  • Zigpoll — Surveys and feedback.

  • Stamped — Ratings and reviews

That’s a lot of apps … more than I would normally recommend. But they are making it work. I think that there are several old apps that they tried and failed to remove completely, so not all the redundant stuff is actually running. At least, that’s my guess without diving deeply into their code.

Marketing Stuff They Do

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

Literally 90% of their traffic comes from Direct Navigation (about 30%) and Search (organic and paid = about 60%). This results in an average of ~250k visits per month. They have a 

, 

, 

, and 

accounts and they are nicely active … but social media only accounts for about 3% of their traffic.

That why they are a keyword-apalooza for tasty SEO results. And since they have caved out such a savory niche, keywording results on things like “Jolly Rancher Candy,” Jawbreakers,” and “Pixie Sticks” is easy.

Below you will find 3 sample paid search ads and 3 paid social media ads for your review and inspiration.

Sponsored

Let us help you make your eCommerce bring in the chewy profits. If you need help making Shopify website tweaks or fixing those little nagging things on your Shopify store, let’s get stuff done.