OK … so at the risk of you all thinking that I am obsessed with chicken nuggets, allow me to say in my own defense that I am perfectly fine. I understand that chicken nuggets have their place in the universe …. as the source of all light and life and the fountain of all things tasty and delicious.

Gordon Ramsey WISHES he could cook the perfect nugget.

Iron Chef Bobby Flay dreams of those golden morsels of fried fowl at night.

But turns out everyone has their own definition of what makes good fried chicken. I nearly came to blows with my next-door neighbor Bob the other day because he said that Chick-Fil-A made the best nuggets.

Once I stopped laughing I realized he was serious.

I mean sure … there ain’t nothing “wrong” with Chick-Fil-A nuggets. I’d happily eat them if there was not a McDonalds nearby … and if someone else was paying for ‘em. But there is just no substitute for the crispy, deep-fried, golden crunch of chicken-like processed protein that is McDonalds Chicken Nuggets. And the fact that they cost a lot less is just a bonus IMHO.

Anyway … Bob’s face got all red and he stormed off muttering something about trans-fats and MSG. But all I heard was “They’re delicious!”

Makes me feel less guilty about borrowing Bob’s snow shovel back in 2019 … I really should return that thing, but I think Bob’s forgotten about it and bought a new one anyway. People are funny.

But I may have to change my mind on this whole chicken caper. When I got back to the office to write this week’s eCommerce missive, I discovered that Chick-Fil-A has fired up an eCommerce site on Shopify, and that’s an indication of taste and distinction that I just can’t ignore.

So, let’s take a look.

Happy Selling,
Zach

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Shopify Teardown Target of the Week:
Shop.Chick-Fil-A.com

Chick-Fil-A is a VERY unique company. Everyone knows that they are closed on Sundays. But not everyone knows that they are one of what some call the “Holy Grail” of independent restaurant chains. They are one of the top two most successful fast-food brands that never went public or got acquired. In-N-Out Burger in another one. But Chick-Fil-A is bigger, with higher annual per store sales. In fact, in 2022 total sales reached $6.4 billion across nearly 2500 locations … but since they are privately-held, these are low-end professional industry estimates. Many think that the actual sales are even higher.

The company was founded in Hapeville, Georgia, by serial restaurant entrepreneur Truett Cathy in 1946 when good ‘ol Truett invented the ubiquitous chicken sandwich at his local restaurant called The Dwarf House. I guess in today’s society we’d call it the “Height-Challenged Dwelling” or something, but back then he meant that the building itself was small … not that they served only dwarves … or little people … or … um.

I’m going to stop now before I get in trouble.

The Shopify Theme That They Use

So … here we have a multi-billion dollar company dipping its toe into the sauce of company branded merchandise. They can “afford” to pull out the stops. Hundreds of thousands of dollars is a rounding error in their marketing budget. But do they waste their money are a built-from-scratch custom theme?

No … no they do not.

Instead, the kings of southern-style chicken sandwiches picked a really solid and powder premium theme from the Shopify theme store … one that you can pick up too for $300. It’s called the Spark theme from Fluorescent Design and you can see it for yourself here. And then had an agency add things and tweak. Heck … that sounds like my business model.

Stuff They Do Well

Aside from the fact that the website features a bunch of teenagers who look WAY too happy to be wearing clothes that come from a chicken restaurant, things look pretty good. And it works a lot better than I expected on mobile too. The video frames up well and everything is perfectly responsive.

The site is on-theme and message. Like a nugget-sized rock.

Chick-Fil-A obviously spent some of their chicken cash and paid for professional photography and videography, along with editing. Most Shopify stores can’t pay this kind of money … and most don’t have to. But credit where due … stuff looks great.

Stuff That Needs Improvement

See that movie running up the hero header area? That thing slows the pages down quite a bit. Actually … it slows them down a lot.

SEO is blah … but I do not think that they are are even trying to generate traffic right now. Everything “works,” but as good as the site looks it feels like ghost ship … no one is working the rudder at the moment.

It’s hard to find any more that is structurally wrong with the site or that is in need of work. But at the risk of repeating myself, the eCommerce site feels like a ghost town. All of the chickens must have crossed the road … so to speak.

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 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.

• OneTrust — Cookie compliance.

• ShopifyPay — Express payment option. Just his one. :-/

• Magnific Popup — Responsive Lightbox

Um … that’s it. No marketing apps, darn near no nothing.

Marketing Stuff That They Do

It looks like this site was created and launched going not the holiday season 2022. We can see traffic spike up to nearly 500k in Q4 … likely capitalizing on their huge fan-base to sell some mercy. And it appears to have worked.

I do not see any current marketing or ad spend of any kind … no social, no search. The social pages linked in the footer actually go to the main social pages for the company as opposed to the merchant site: there is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIN. But these social pages do not get a lot of posting or attention.

And as you can see from the “Apps” section above, they are not using any marketing apps at all right now. So, there you have it … zero marketing. Seems like someone in chicken land should be minding the store and bit better, but when you are selling billions in chicken, maybe it’s hard to get someone to pay attention to bucket hats and T-shirts branded with dipping sauces.

So, here’s picture of paradise to warm you up.

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