Remember the “Old Guy” in the office?

Well, if you do indeed remember the Old Guy, you remember that he loves his coffee. I am looking across the room at him right now and it’s been a long time since I’ve seen him this grumpy.

Seems that they made a mistake on his coffee order this morning and made his double espresso latte with soy milk instead the regular cow stuff.

Of course … me being me … I didn’t help matters when I said it serves him right for ordering a frilly, over-priced cup of joe from a place un-ironicly called “Where Have You Bean.” When you go in there they got Avril Lavigne on their playlist rotation for gosh sake.

Why do all the hipster coffee shops use bad puns to name their business and play Avril Lavigne music?

Anyway … Ever since then he has been sulking at his desk muttering something about communists usurping noble beverage institutions of the world and whatnot. It’s starting to sound like there’s a manifesto in the works.

Don’t worry … I’ll keep an eye on him.

I can’t say I blame him too much. I’m pretty sensitive about my chicken nuggets and wouldn’t want anyone messin’ around with my dippy sauces. Can you even make nugget dippy sauces out of soy? That would definitely be an example of science going too far. I’m not talking about “Soy Sauce” as in Chinese food … that’s more like Asian Worcestershire … that’s totally fine. I’m talking about stuff like Soy Ranch and Soy BBQ sauces … you know, stuff that matters. That would just be wrong.

That reminds me … I have a Soy Sauce joke ….

Q: Why shouldn’t you tease a man when he runs out of Soy Sauce?

A: Because you should never Kikkoman when he’s down.

Admit it … you laughed.

Anyway … that sent me looking for a Shopify site that sold Soy-based products. I found a bunch of them. But I came across one in particular whose business name is also a bad Soy pun. Of course, that’s the one I chose. Let’s meet ‘em.

Happy Selling,
Zach

App of the Week

This app is hotter and more exciting that a fresh shot of espresso. It helps you use email and SMS to get customers and visitors from the past and bring them into the present.

It’s like marketing time-travel, but without the destroy the universe with a paradox aftertaste.

Take a look at Recapture.io.

Shopify Teardown Target of the Week: SoyMuchBrighter.com

It looks like SoyMuchBrighter came on the Shopify scene in 2019. They sell scented candles that are made with soy oils. So, the name of the business is a double pun, and I for one respect that.

Importantly, our analytics suggest that they are selling a LOT of soy candles … nearly $900k per year of them as a matter of fact. That and their traffic stats put them in the top 300k or so in Shopify land. And since Shopify now has 4.5 million sites on the platform, that puts them in the top 7% of all Shopi-iliciousness. Good for them.

They have a physical store in the town of Beverly, MA. It’s possible that they are running their physical store sales through the Shopify POS, but I can’t tell if the $900k is a combination of online and physical location sales or just online. But still … that’s a lot of hipster wax.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

SoyMuchBrighter is using a very nice premium theme … The Envy theme by our friends at Eight Themes. And I think they are using a tweaked version of the Oslo version. Overall I think this is a solid choice … the Envy theme comes with a lot of standard features and loads fast.

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

Stuff They Do Well

It’s tough sometimes, but it’s important to separate personal taste and style from best practices. So, do I like the color palate on this site? Not really. It’s my “my” thing. But it is a well-crafted and well-designed color palate with a “throwback to the 70s” vibe that seems to fit their target audiences and is in alignment with the core feel of their brand. So, they get a thumbs up.

The layout and design are spot on too. Everything about it feels professional, from the photography to the “soft” tone of the images to the staging. Even the custom badges on the home page for things like “vegan ingredients” and “ecofriendly” are well thought out. Solid work. I can see why this site works for them.

They do a really good job on the Express payment options like PayPal. That’s got to be scoring for them. And the PayPal Express link looks good and is well-placed on over-all good-looking Product pages.

Stuff That Needs Improvement

Let’s fix the SEO, shall we? Using the same product page we used above (this one), first is the stuff you can see with your human eyes. Read all the text on that product page. The first thing you notice is that there is not enough of it. But you know what else you don’t see? The word “candle.” If your sole business is selling candles, one might consider using that word on your product pages.

And can you see the product title? Still doesn’t say that it’s a candle, and it also something that no one ever in the history of the internet ever did an organic search for. the exact same text is used as the ALT tag for the image:

“Love & Lavender: Lavender + Orange + Lemon”

So, when I say fix the sEO I mean fix it EVERYWHERE. Heck … you will get more traffic.

The theme loads super-fast, but the site itself loads just OK. The reason is that there are a few apps that are preloading, some images that have some fat that can be trimmed without compromising quality, and some primary contentful paint images are “lazy loading,” which hurts your scores. The rewards app is choking a little bit too and needs some attention. Again, these are all fixable with tweaking images and app loading. We’ve seen WAY worse. Just saying that there is room here to improve.

Per peeve time … see on the main navigation menu how they have the word “Home” there? We all know that clicking on the logo takes you home more reliably than Dorothy’s Ruby Slippers. That main nav is golden space that shalt not be wasted thus.

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 7.7 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 — Express payment options.

• Boomerang — User-side analytics.

• Printful — they are doing a VERY small amount of drop=ship business with Printful .. not worth mentioning, and likely not worth the effort n their part, and likely not worth the speed penalty. But it’s for charity so maybe.

• Seal Subscriptions and Loyalty — This could be the rewards tags I see in the code.

Um … that’s it. Three. It’s odd because I can see Rewards code and image calls in the code, but do not see Rewards app in the scan. No idea. Makes me think that there are other things going on behind the scenes that are hidden for some reason.

Marketing Stuff That They Do

Everyone wants to know about the marketing, so let’s get to it.

We don’t see this very often … the analytics tools suggest that 100% of their traffic comes from Direct Navigation. OK … I’ve NEVER seen that before. They have Facebook and Instagram pages, but all the recent Facebook posts are auto re-posts from Insta. They have about 1k follows on Face and 14k follows on Insta … so, that’s “OK,” but not stirring things up much. I see no paid social ads. And I see no paid search ads either.

That means no samples to show you [insert “Zach’s sad face” here].

So, here’s the deal. They may be happy with their in-person business and the added bump of a little online revenue. If they want to grow the business, I am not seeing much evidence of it because marketing = near zero. They do have a fairly aggressive pop-up for subscriptions, so they may be putting all their time into email marketing to repeat visitors … if so, that’s great. I just can’t help but think that there is a lot of easy-pickings marketing that they SHOULD be doing.

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