Another "Best of" Checkout Weekly!
During our run-up to the end of the year, we are running a short series highlighting the most popular newsletters of 2022. Today's installment comes from back on April 12th and represents our 4th most popular edition of the year ... as measured by opens and shares.
In this one, the intro was mercifully short. I say "mercifully" because we were highlighting a Shopify shoe merchant and ... well, let's just say I got carried away with the footwear puns. But you must have liked it. :-)
Enjoy.
— Zach
Spring is the crazy season here in the Midwest.
In case some of you are unaware, the spacious TaskHusky offices are located in southern Michigan. That means the weather in the springtime is literally insane. In early April it can be snowing today, 80 degrees tomorrow, and then have a freeze warning the day after that. If we’re lucky we’ll have a total of seven beautiful Spring days spread out across three weeks.
Then it’s mosquito season.
Anyway … Easter is this weekend and it’s rare to have a snow after that. Time to give ‘Ol Man Winter the boot, so to speak. Soon there will be no more ice to clog the gutters and we can put on our sandals, pump up the kiddie pool, and sling some burgers on the grill ‘cuz summer’s coming.
Speaking of boots, clogs, sandals, pumps, and slings … this week’s Shopify target sells a LOT of all of them in their signature funky urban style. Let’s meet them, shall we?
And yes, all those puns make me feel like a heel.
Happy Selling,
Zach
This Week’s Shopify Audit: JeffreyCampbellShoes.com
Jeffrey Campbell Shoes is all about youthful, urban chic shoes. They sell their fashion-funky footwear on their site, all three social media platforms, on Amazon, and through a slew of resellers, specialty shops, and department stores like Nordstrom and Macy’s. They sell a LOT of shoes.
The Shopify Theme That They Use
The Icon theme from our friends at We Are Underground is a great Shopify theme for selling fashion. It’s clean, responsive, and focused on visuals. A great way to let the colors and styles sell for you. Jeffrey Campbell Shoes uses this theme. And the best part is that it is a rather low-priced premium theme. Take a look at it for yourself here.
What They Do Well
This might sound unglamorous, but this site is less about doing a few things special and more about doing nothing bad. Everything is tight and buttoned down. They did not waste money or time on fancy display tactics and code-heavy tracking tools. They focus on the basics and making those basics as clean and fast as possible. This is a very smart approach.
The website is rather understated as compared to their social media posts. This is on purpose. To my eye, JeffreyCampbellShoes considers their REAL store to be the social media platforms and the Shopify site is just the back office … the business end.
What Needs to Be Improved
The checkout process is fairly smooth, but the Express payment code is loading way too slow — especially in the shopping cart. I sat there and started at the screen waiting for it to finish rendering for more than 2 minutes before I gave up. So, the question is after all that delay whether “express” payment is still happening. This should be fixed.
The Shopify Apps They Use
We used our top-secret Shopify scanning tools to determine that this site is using the following apps and plugins:
- AccessiBe — Accessibility monitoring app for compliance.
- Preact — Customer support.
- SMSBumo — Text based marketing.
- Cover Pics — Instagram feed as social storefront.
- Back in Stock — Inventory alerts.
- SEO Manager — Just what it sounds like … SEO tool for Shopify stores.
- Bugsnag – The app that snag bugs … in software. Seeing this app EVERYWHERE these days.
- Yotpo — A very popular review app.
- AfterPay — Installment payment option.
- ShopifyPay/PayPal/ApplePay – These are Express payment options. Love ‘em all.
- Boomerang – Performance analytics. Just a little piece of code, actually.
- Flickety – Touch responsive image carousels.
That’s only a dozen or so additional apps. It’s very impressive that there are so few.
Marketing Stuff They Do
JeffreyCampbellShoes posts a LOT on social media. They favor the organic posting route on Facebook (290k followers), Instagram (951k followers), and Pinterest (15.5k followers). There are well over a million unique follows among those, and that is a way-good base to build a business on. We cannot find any direct Facebook ads, but they even have an extensive, separate Facebook online storefront, so we suspect that any social ads are being run by an agency and referral program.
We can get our hands on a bunch of search ads that they are running, so as we do what we do, here are 3 samples so you can see how they do it.
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