Love and Hip Hop ... on Shopify

Your home-boy Zachy-Zach busts out with the gansta, yo!

You know what I was thinking about?

And I know what you’re thinking … you’re thinking, “DUH! Obviously!”

And while, sure … I might look more Amish Paradise than Coolio … some might even unfairly suggest that I am a little bit more “White and Nerdy” and a little less Chamillionaire … but when it comes to eCommerce I’m the kinda Shopi-G little homies wanna be like.

Word.

Want more proof? TaskHusky is based in Michigan. You can’t get more street cred than that, right? Sure, we’re not in Detroit. Our ‘hood is on the other side of Michigan where the definition of “bling” is a new coat of lacquer on your fishing boat. All the graffiti tags in town is in either John Deere Green or Mahindra Red. For us, a low rider is a tractor stuck in a ditch. Hip Hop is the limp that ‘Ol Man Johnson from Kalamazoo has had since he came back from ‘Nam in 1969.

But otherwise it’s just the same as 8-mile, for’shizzle.

In fact, I think that the only thing separating me from Dr. Dre and Biggie Smalls is a cool rap name. So I thought the coolest thing in the world would be to use Artificial Intelligence to pick my new rap name for me. Smart, right? So, I uploaded my photo to DALL-E and typed a sample of my sick rhymes into ChatGPT and punched send.

Have you ever heard an AI laugh at you? It’s not a pleasant sound and … quite frankly, it was soooo not necessary and a little more hurtful that I expected from a glorified bot dressed up in fancy pants. But when the AI was done fooling around it suggested that I call myself “Vanilla Blanco.”

Anyway … that’s like the stupidest rap name ever. So, I told the AI it was dumber than Windows Vista running on a Pentium 4 and to try again. This time it said my rap name should be “Emotional Detachment.”

Like I care what some dumb computer says.

Anyway … let’s do something risky. Share some love back my way and tell me what you think my rap name should be … just hit reply to this email and keep it clean. I’ll let you know if you all come up with anything interesting.

In the meantime, I thought I would go shopping for some new threads to match my new gangsta-rap persona. So, I looked for Shopify sites selling Hip Hopp’in gear so I can sag with some swagger. Turns out there are a TON of them. But I found one using an interesting theme, so let’s take a look at this week’s Checkout Weekly eComm website teardown target.

Happy Selling,
Zach

App of the Week

When you are smooth as fresh jar of Skippy — such as I am — all the ladies wave their hands in the air and holla. But sometimes you gotta give ‘em one more chance.

That’s what Recapture does … it helps you reach out to give all those site visitors one more shot via email and SMS.

Hit up the digits at Recapture.io.

Shopify Teardown Target of the Week: TheHipHopEStore.com

Curtis Daniel III attended the BEST sports university in the world … Michigan State … in the early ‘90s on a football scholarship. Go Spartans!!

He went on to found Patchwerk Studios, THE place to be for recording that Atlanta sound and shooting video. The HipHopEStore was founded by Curtis to showcase a collection of gear curated by Curtis himself. He brought the eCommerce store to Shopify in 2019 as a side gig. Feels like a local hero makes a name for himself kinda story to me.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

I love it when a small Shopify store picks a great premium them and rolls with it. And Curtis is using one we do not see very often, but it is a great one from our friends at the developer company We Are Underground. And this theme has perhaps the coolest theme name in the history of theme names.

Fashionopoloism.

Great, right? They are using the Galleria variant of that theme, and you can take it for a test drive yourself on the Shopify App Store here.

Stuff They Do Well

Everything requires context. Here in your fav eCommerce newsletter in the entire galaxy, we review billion-dollar brands, start-ups, hobby/crafters, Mom-and-Pop stores, and everything in between. The standards are just NOT the same going from one to the other.

I’m NOT speaking for Curtis Daniel … he can speak for himself. What I’m saying is that what this looks like to me is an add-on store to a core business that allows them to sell some branded merch. And that’s totally legit. If I were a cheeky writer looking to get a cheap laugh … I would say that’s 2 Legit 2 Quit. But the point is that Kylie Cosmetics is a billion-dollar brand built on the Kardashian’s fame, image, and personality. They spend millions on marketing. Their SEO budget is larger than the total revenue of 90% of all Shopify stores. They should be held up to the highest standards.

That said … when you are a small Shopify store, everything begins with your selection of a theme. When your budget is small, the theme you choose will account for the vast majority of your site’s style and capability. So choosing a good theme is the best practice that starts it all. And The HipHopEStore picked a solid theme that is designed for what they do. So good job there.

The theme is deployed most clean, right out of the box. it feels both fashion-forward and urban. In short, it works. The photography and graphics are solid and on point.

They have both installment payment options and express payment options … these are always good moves.

Stuff That Needs Improvement

Let’s start with something that’s easy to fix. Take a look at this product page. The primary image on this page demonstrates one of the most common mistakes that small brands make that impacts the user experience. Once that image fully loads, you might notice that it looks like a pretty good image with good quality … and you would be right. But what the site admin did was use the camera in their phone to snap a picture of a new product and upload it to the site.

Now … do not get me wrong. You can TOTALLY use a high quality phone to snap you pics. But the native resolutions of this image is … in a word … HUGE! This picture is uploading at 42 inches wide and 56 inches high. Those are NOT typos. It loads at over 15 MB in size. That is nearly 8 times larger than the best practices recommend for the entire page. And it does NOT have to be that way.

You can have GREAT quality on eCommerce product pages with a simple resizing at 4” with 150 dpi like the pros and saving it as a JPEG instead of a PNG. PNGs are the default image for a lot of screen captures and some phones. But photos should ALWAYS be saved as JPEGs and line art/logos as PNGs. You fix these issues and the image jumps down to … wait for it … just 101k …. 101k! That’s 158 times smaller and it loads in milliseconds.

Want to see what that new, resized image looks like? here it is (below). Looks great, right?

If you are having page speed issues and want to fix your image sizes, let us know. We help sites fix this kind of stuff all the time.

There are other tweaks and things to be improved … but let’s use this as a teaching moment and leave it as is.

Zach-o-meter Score

All in all, not bad. In fact, improve these issues and tweak a bit more here and there and I would score it higher.

As it, this site gets a total Zach-o-meter score of 6.5 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.

  • Bugsnag — The most popular app in Shopify land these days to snag them darn code bugs.

  • ShopifyPay/ApplePay/PayPal/AmazonPay — Express payment options. ShopifyPay also has installment payments built in.

  • Photoswipe — Image gallery.

Um … that’s it. No marketing apps, no analytics beyond Google.

Friends of Checkout Weekly

Marketing Stuff That They Do

Again … context matters. This eCommerce site is NOT the core business. And you get the impression that it’s just for those “in the know” or who find the site organically or link to it from related sites and referrals.

I could find no paid search ads and no social media ads. And although Patchwerk Recording Studios has a full set of social media pages, the HipHopEStore eComm site has none. Zip, zero, nada … nothing. There are no marketing apps to discuss and no ads to show you.

I can’t help but think that … with a little bit of marketing love … there would be a lot more merchant success here.

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