Old Zach McClung he had a farm … AI, AI, O!

It seems that you can’t open social media these days without hearing someone prattle on and on about ChatGPT-this and Google Bard-that and how AI is going to become self-aware and do the Skynet thing to terminate us all and stuff.

So, you’re probably asking yourself, “What does my ‘ol buddy Zach think about AI?”

Well … I got your chat-bot right here.

The first thing that you have to understand is that Google and OpenAI and all the rest … these are what they call “Large Language Models” or LLMs. And they “trained” these complex algorithms on content from the web. You know who wrote all that web content? Humans like us … well, humans like me and MAYBE like you. You could be a bot or something that’s offended when someone thinks you are a human. I do not want to mis-species you. But the point is that all those so-called AIs are just repeating back to us the kinds of language it was trained on. And since it was trained on “us” and what we wrote on the internet … and since most of what is on the internet is garbage … well, let’s just say that it’s not surprising to me that these AI thingies are wrong a lot and make crap up.

When I talk about this with a lot of my friends in the tech-world, they say things like, “But Zach! ChatGPT got a high score on the SATs” or “It passed the Bar exam in Chicago!” Sure, but come’on guys … that just makes ChatGPT a search engine without the ads. And that’s cool and all … and I can totally see how Google is all freaked out because serving up all those ads is what keeps the Dom Pérignon flowing at the HQ in Mountain View. But that don’t mean AI is going to eat my chicken nuggets … if you know what I mean.

Just to be sure, I got one of the fancy paid-for ChatGPT accounts and asked the AI to tell me a joke. This is what it gave me:

And it turns out that CheeterGPT just stole that joke from some poor guy on Twitter. So, since your fav newsletter is actually written each week and NOT ripped off content, all the chuckles and giggles you receive each week are 100% Organic and Cage Free.

I ain’t too worried about being replaced by a computer.

But you know what I am worried about? I’m worried about talking-head news-monkeys like Wolf Blitzed on CNN reading text off a teleprompter as if it were scripture. If they start feeding Cheetos text from AI into that device we are all going to be living in a daisy-chained reality where AI is “trained” on Justin Bieber lyrics and Kardashian fan-sites and we suck it all back in like gospel regurgitated back to us during the nightly news.

That, my friends, is a real dystopian nightmare that even George Orwell couldn’t think up.

Anyway … I started thinking that there might be a few eCommerce sites selling robots. I found one that specializes in the kind of robots that suck … literally.

So, let’s take a look.

Happy Selling,
Zach

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Shopify Teardown Target of the Week: RobotSpecialists.com.au

I honestly don’t know how I’d feel about being a robot today. I mean, imagine that you are a kid robot and your heroes are Commander Data from Star Trek The Next Generation and the Terminator. But when you grow up, you discover that 99% of the robots in the world spend all their cycles turning on lights like The Clapper and sweeping up the floor.

Come to think of it, that is a rather “human” experience. I wanted to be a cowboy or a fireman.

Anyway … RobotSpecialists call themselves “Australia’s Number 1 Online Robotics Provider.” And that sounds REALLY cool until you realize that they actually specialize in the floor-sweeping kind of robot. Don’t get me wrong … robot vacuums are great and all. It’s just that I was expecting a little more Robocop and a little less Groundskeeper Willie.

But RobotSpecialists seems to be doing OK. They have a physical store in Cheltenham, Victoria, Australia that they opened in 2017 and they came online in Shopify-land in 2018. Looks like they are doing a couple-thousand per month in eComm to supplement their physical store sales. Their physical location is also a service center for the products they sell. Although they do sell the vacuum robots themselves online, the impression is that that the online business supports the selling of higher profit items like supplies and accessories ... that’s a solid 3-prong business model.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

We love the folks at Pixel Union … they build good themes. RobotSpecialists is using Pixel Union’s Empire theme. This theme comes in four styles, and it looks like they are using the Depot variant.

You can see the theme for yourself and take it for a test drive on the Shopify theme store.

Stuff They Do Well

The site is professionally built out and maintained. They are using the site for shipped eComm orders as well as a landing page for their physical business. And they have created a page to help customers trouble-shoot repairs and maintenance AND to handle these things remotely through the mail. Australia is so freak’in huge and dotted with small towns everywhere that this seems to me to be a valuable service.

If you are a regular reader of this non-AI-written missive … and why would you not be … then you know how powerful Trust Badges are. The folks at RobotSpecialists obviously know this too. There are two bands of Trust Badges on every single page. Look at the home page as an example. Just under the main menu there is a line of clear eComm messages with matching icons talking about delivery and company ratings and being the largest. Then there is another one at the bottom just above the footer. Works for me.

They make judicious use of Hero images and even an in-context video about mid-way down on the home page as well. It all feels professional and serious about vacuuming robots. So, visually it is great … top notch. But they pay an unnecessary price (see Needs Improvement section).

The product pages are strong and actually have some decent SEO text on average. Here is an example.

Solid deployment of Express payment options and installment payments.

Stuff That Needs Improvement

I just told you how good all those images and videos look, right? Right. But those images and videos are HUGE and slow down the page load tragically. But it does not have to be this way. If they spend a little more time optimizing those images and videos and then set the code so the videos do not not run UNTIL the user sees them (very doable), then they will get out of tragic slowness-land.

Some of the most valuable real estate on any website is the mai menu navigation. This is doubly true in eCommerce. See the very first item in the menu is “About.” Now, they have a nice About page, but there is no way this is work standing in between customers and the buying journey. Put things like this LAST in the menu … even better, put it in the footer menu instead.

OK … let’s look at this product page again. Scroll down to the “Frequently Bought Together” section. When I viewed this page, it showed me four different full robot vacuums that are incompatible with each other. And I would be willing to bet a months’s-worth of chicken nuggets that no one has ever — in the history of robot vacuums — purchased four completely different robot vacuums at the same time … ever. These Frequently Bought Together sections are great … but you have to make the results real … or even just “real-ish.” Someone obviously just set it up and forgot it.

Zach-o-meter Score

Overall, this site is in pretty good shape. I think it is working for them. Let’s give it a Zach-o-meter score of 8.0 out of 10.

The Shopify Apps They Use

As usual, we used our super-duper top secret Shopify website analysis tools to peek under the hood and see what apps they are running on the site. Take a look. If you like what you see on their site you may want to look into the apps that they are using too.

• Care Cart — Cart abandonment app.

• Bond Commerce — Conversion optimization.

• Klaviyo — Customer lifecycle managment.

• Lucky Orange — Live visitor anaytics.

• Amplitude — Mobile device analytics.

• Microsoft Clarity — Site analytics … free version.

• Back in Stock — Inventory notifications.

• Okendo — Customer reviews.

• Bugsnag — This is the code cleaning tool of champions these days.

• Bold Upsell — Upsell / cross-sell app.

• Afterpay — Installment payment option.

• Humm — Interest-free financing option.

• Klarna — Checkout optimization.

• MailChimp — They have the new MailChimp integration there, so good on them.

• ShopifyPay/ApplePay/GooglePay/Amazon Payment — Express payment options.

• DoubleClick — An Ad network, so it looks like they are getting ready to buy some ads.

• AdRoll — Retargeting ads.

Seventeen items in the list this week. That’s a fairly heavy lift for a site like this. I suspect that there are some slowness issues that can be cleaned up if we dig a little deeper into the code on these..

Marketing Stuff That They Do

They are aggressively collecting email addresses — always a good move. Getting the email is the only way to truly “own” the customer relationship and maximize customer lifetime value. Just make sure that you do not email too often and burn the lists.

They are doing a TON of paid search ads. I’ve grabbed three of the most current ones as examples for you to see below. As you can see from the app listing, they are using retargeting tactics to capture visitors as they crawl around the web.

RobotSpecialists has pages on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube … but the YouTube has just four videos and is not getting much love. They are running a good number of social media ads. I can see them stretching back into last year, mostly on Facebook. There are three recent examples below as well for your review and inspiration.

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