Do you like horror flicks? Lots of folks like to watch scary stories about haunted mansions and demonic serial killers and crap. Not me. Being a tech entrepreneur is plenty scary enough.

What … you think I’m exaggerating? When Google tweaking their search algorithm or Apple trimming social data sets from Facebook ads can transform your profit to a loss over the weekend, you know what true anxiety is. And do NOT get me started on the hackers and phishing scams out there. The online world is a dangerous place.

OK … getting your data hacked because of an unpatched app is technically NOT the same as being hacked by “Jason” in the latest installment of the Halloween movie franchise. But the ups and downs of tech-life have the distinction of being real. Well, it’s the internet so let’s just say “real-ish.”

Anyway … I started thinking about scary crap because I was spying on the Evil Empire — Amazon — and they presented me with an ad. Did you know that Amazon got $38 b-b-billion in ad revenue last year alone? Bastards. Talk about your Nightmare on Shop Street … they got more than 50% margin on that ad rev. These greedy crap-heads get money from the ads, margin on the sales, a cut of the credit card fees, a piece of the logistics, AND charge folks to host it all on their servers. Damn.

What was I talking about? Oh yea … I was conducting eCommerce “intelligence” operations on Amazon and they showed me an ad for a TV show that is streamed on Amazon Prime Video called “Them.” Long story short, it turned out to be a weird horror series with spooky evil crap. Totally NOT what I was looking for.

I may, or may not, have slept with the lights on for a few nights.

Anyway … there was also a kitschy monster flick back in the 1950s called “Them!” too. Remember those old Cold War-era films where something would get radiated by nuclear bombs or whatnot and them become … well, big and scary? This was one of those films. In this case, it’s ants from New Mexico who got super-huge and ate everyone. But this film is NOT scary because everyone knows that nuclear bomb-radiated insects don’t grow huge and eat you … that’s completely ridiculous. Radiated insects actually turn you into Spiderman … which is cool and totally believable. Duh.

But now I’m compelled to look for a Shopify site based on “Them” in some way. I found one, and it had nothing to do with nuclear radiated insects or haunted neighborhoods.

Let’s have a look.

Happy Selling,
Zach

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Shopify Teardown Target of the Week: ThemGoods.com

Do you skateboard or rollerblade or roller-skate? Dude, if you are in the skate community it is a WHOLE ‘nother world my friend. We have reviewed a few skate sites in the past, but these guys make serious BANK. They specialize in skate wear and trendy related fashion crap. But the main focus on on Rollerblades. They sell private label rollerblades and all the shoes and accessories a neighborhood skatepark hooligan could dream of. And our analytics suggest that they sell upwards of $2.4 million per year of the stuff.

This makes them not only a top 60k eCommerce site overall, but it makes them a top 18k site on Shopify. They get about 25,000 visitors per month to the site, generating 84,000 page views … these are numbers to envy. And they have been on the Shopify platform since 2016 at least. They also have a physical store location in Santa Ana, CA, that looks pretty sharp as well … although “skate shop in So-Cal” seems a bit of a cliché. And who’s that spooky-looking dude standing in the store doorway?

I suspect that the sales number is for both online AND physical store sales since I detect Shopify POS in the code.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

There is an up-and-coming Shopify theme developer called GetSiteControl, and this is one of their premium themes. Specifically, it is the Sheer variant of their Aurora theme, which you can see for yourself here. Looks good on laptop AND mobile, and it costs less than $300 bucks.

Stuff They Do Well

The site is completely sales-efficient. There is no wasted space or navigation. There is not even an About Us page. They know they got the products all the kiddies like and they get to selling ‘em.

they make solid use of video throughout the site. Skate kids love to see other skate kids to skate stuff.

Here’s a win … all those videos and all those images are optimized pretty well. This site is darn-near perfectly balanced for image/video quality and speed. Someone work very hard to strike this balance and I appreciate the hard work.

Stuff That Needs Improvement

OK … I know that I am totally NOT the target audience for ThemGoods. But whether you look on laptop or mobile the hero image flickers every second and makes my head hurt.

Zach-o-meter Score

This is a REALLY strong Shopify site … let’s give it a Zach-o-meter score of 8.5 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 — This is the code cleaning tool of champions these days.

• FastClick — Speed optimization for touch screen displays (like phones).

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

• CrUX Dataset — Detailed Analytics.

I want to take a moment to point out that there is a professional web guy in the mix here. They are expertly using Content Deliver Networks for the images and videos. But they are also outsourcing DNS to a special service to speed things up. This is NOT used by most merchants on Shopify. These guys feel the need for speed and are investing in it.

There are also very few apps … that list is WAY short. Makes me think that they are running more, but that there is masking and speed optimization to fool the Goolge-bots and tools from seeing the work behind the scenes. In fact, I can see not one, but TWO bot-disallow tools hiding things.

Marketing Stuff That They Do

ThemGoods has a Facebook page, Instagram page, and YouTube channel. By far, they post the most to YouTube … lots of action shots skating around Orange County. And there are actually doing some production … check out this sample video.

I found NO paid search ads and NO paid social ads … at least not in the last three months or so. Are they running stuff through a third-party? Could be. I’ll bet that the are doing merch bartering with local skate crowd … that’s what I would do if I were them. If they are using an affiliate marketing or tracking app of some kind, it is hidden behind their anti-bot code.

All that means that I have no ads to show you. Which makes me sad. But then I found a picture of a Husky on a skateboard and got all happy again.

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