So, back in the day … when I was a studly dude in high school … I ran track. Now being a closer-to-middle-age-but-still-studly-and-youthful tech entrepreneur … such as I am … I decided to get back in shape. Anyway … I got this new app on my phone that not only tracks my calories, but reports my progress with cute terminology. For example, today it told me that I had “lost a pineapple” since my last weigh-in, being that the average weight of a pineapple is ~2 lbs, the app was saying that I lost 2 lbs.

Yay me!

But in a way that’s ironic because pineapples are actually good for you. You don’t “want” to lose your pineapples. Pineapples contains plenty of nutrients and beneficial compounds, such as vitamin C, manganese, and enzymes to help aid digestion. Eating pineapple may also help boost immunity, lower cancer risk, and improve recovery time … or so I’ve read.

And so, once again, your ‘ol buddy Zach falls down the rabbit hole because his OCD mind can now think of nothing but pineapples.

Turns out I’m not the only one. Remember that TV show called Psych a few years back? Gosh … I guess it send nearly a decade ago now. Well, anyway … they had this running gag where they would put a pineapple or reference to a pineapple or a picture of a pineapple in every episode. It actually became a thing.

Did you know that the pineapple is NOT indigenous to Hawaii? It ACTUALLY comes from South America. Hawaii has all the great real estate, you’d think they wouldn’t need to steal the fruit reputation of someplace else.

Crap! turns out that Hawaii also stole macadamia nuts from Australia. And that “famous” Kona coffee? That comes from Yemen. Dang … that Hawaii is some kind of shifty gansta. I wonder who they stole the volcanoes from?

Anyway … I decided to look for a Shopify site that had something to do with pineapples — because that’s how I roll — and I found a lot of them. But I found one in particular that is doing a great job AND selling the crap out of it.

Let’s have a look.

Happy Selling,
Zach

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Shopify Teardown Target of the Week: Pineapple-Island.com

Speaking of stealing identities … check these guys out. Pineapple-Island sells beachy jewelry and kitchy clothing and accessories like you would find in a hotel tourist shop in the Caribbean. You know … beach bags and pooka-shell bracelets and coral necklaces and all that crap. But even though these guys are located in the South … we are actually talking about the South of the United Kingdom. So, while you might expect them to sell King Arthur swords, Bobbie hats, and scale models of red double-decker busses … they sell “surfer paradise” hats. Those cheeky bastards.

But they sell a LOT of beach stuff. In fact, they sell nearly $140k per month to approximately 13k monthly visitors. And if you are counting, that equals about $1.7 million per year, making then a top 25k merchant on Shopify island.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

We have been seeing a TON of instances of the Prestige theme from our friends a Maestrooo. This is indeed another one. Great theme for fashion brands of nearly all types.

Importantly, these guys are doing $1.7 million in annual sales with a nicely tweaked and modified theme that costs $350. I keep tell’in you … anyway … if you want to see that theme for yourself you can take a look here on the Shopify theme store.

Stuff They Do Well

There is a lot to like about this site … and one thing to hate. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s start with the good stuff.

The site is clean and well0-organized. Note the main menu navigation is just three items, all about buying stuff. The “Shop” link opens up a mega menu of well organized categories.

Take a look at the product pages, like this one. Note that all the elements are there … installment payments, good images that are professionally displayed, express payment options, a good color/version selector, reviews … they have even done a good job with SEO text.

Stuff That Needs Improvement

First, a pet peeve. This merchant is ecological and green and all that … good on them. But they thought it would be cool to try to change the way EVERYONE IN THE WORLD thinks and say things. Do you see low on the Home page where they say “carbon positive?” Well, for the entire rest of the world the term “carbon neutral” means that you are not hurting the planet, and “carbon negative” means that you are actually doing things to take carbon out of the environment. So … “carbon positive” means … what, that you are dumping a ton of stuff where on should not if one is a ”Green” leaning organization? Sure … I know what they were trying to do, but they should not.

The site loads like poop. Now, nearly all that poop-iness is related to a handful of images and videos that are so NOT formatted and optimized properly. There are single images larger that 4.5MB. The entire home page should be 2MB. Somebody just screwed up because I can see some images that are formatted pretty well. But when you have more than 20MB of excess load on your home page it’s like swimming in deep, shark-infested waters wearing an anchor.

There are also some apps (e.g., TrustPilot) that are running slow.

They say “speed kills” … it does on eCommerce too. The slow loads really hurt on search ranking and mobile too. And sometimes the big files fail to load … like this … see the little sad face icon?

Zach-o-meter Score

This is a REALLY strong Shopify site … let’s give it a Zach-o-meter score of 8.3 out of 10. It would have been higher without the image fails. As much as I liked the site and style overall, every page load was frustrating and slow and sometimes caused the page to jitter.

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.

• LoyaltyLion — Loyalty program.

• Cometly — Ad tracking.

• Klaviyo — Customer lifecycle.

• TrustPilot — customer reviews (there is a slowness problem here as well).

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

• AfterPay/ClearPay — Installment payments.

• PayPal/AmazonPay/ShopifyPay/ApplePay/Google Pay — Express payment options.

• Klarna — Mobile checkout optimization.

• Maestro — NOT the same as the theme developer … these guys process payments.

• Secomapp — Conversion optimization.

• BON Loyalty — Rewards app.

• Fingerprint — Fraud detection.

• UnionPay — international payment gateway.

• LayoutHub — Shopify page builder/modifier.

• Flickety — Mobile-optimized image carousels.

• DoubleClick — Ad network.

That’s a pretty heavy list, and a lot of those apps impact resources. This is another reason the site is slow. The slowness part is fixable.

Marketing Stuff That They Do

Pineapple-Island has a Facebook page, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok presence … these were not surprising. But they also have a LInkedIn page linked from their site. We do not see this very often because consumer marketing (B2C) is challenging there.

They are doing email marketing and have a nice email registration pop-up and process. It also looks like they are doing retargeting ads. We were able to find only a single paid search ad … which is odd. But we found that they are running a LOT of ads on social media, including on Facebook, Instagram, and we think on TikTok (but could not confirm).

The search ad and examples of three social ads are below for your review and inspiration.

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