Why PageSpeed's evil, Blogging Better, and a sports league teardown
We discuss what an accessibility lawsuit costs, why Google PageSpeed is our Emperor Palpatine, building better blog pages in Shopify, and finally we tear down the official Minor League Baseball store.
Kurt Elster: I think this is a situation where being paranoid about it is good.
Paul Reda: No. I mean, it happened to me once at the AV Club, where I recorded an entire podcast, back when recording a podcast, in 2008, was like, “What are you even doing?” And we recorded the whole episode and I… It was my fault. I fucked something up and we were not recording the audio. It was an hour. It was over an hour, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, by the way, that episode we recorded two days ago, we didn’t.”
Kurt Elster: Oh, God.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it was bad.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I’ve only lost two episodes where we were like… I’ve never forgot to hit record, but somehow the file never ended up where it should be, and I couldn’t find it again. That’s happened two times, and I distinctly remember both. It was a quality episode with Arri Bagah, who knows Messenger marketing inside and out, that is just lost to the ether.
Paul Reda: The Ether… cycle?
Kurt Elster: Man! I’m bummed about the pandemic being back. I guess it didn’t really go away.
Paul Reda: Illinois’s doing fine, though. Well, for Illinois, they release zone data. The state has been split up into four separate zones.
Kurt Elster: I didn’t know that.
Paul Reda: You didn’t? Are you not paying attention to this?
Kurt Elster: I get my COVID news from like COVIDNow, it’s like a newsletter, and it gives me a score and some KPIs for areas I subscribe to, so I get it for the state and our county.
Paul Reda: I thought you were gonna say you got it from like VaccinesRBad.org.
Kurt Elster: What? No! I’m pro vaccine. Give it all to me. Do they got eyeball shots? I want it. Let me know. I’m getting it.
Paul Reda: No. Illinois, they split it into four zones, I think. And the zones can go into different levels of lockdown, and everyone was pissed who lived in the collar counties, like you, who lived in Lake County, those people were like, “Well, why do we have to be in the same zone as Chicago. We know it’s a Chicago city urban problem with cities and urban things, and density in urban. Urban. You know, urban.”
Kurt Elster: The city is different and bad!
Paul Reda: So, they were all pissed about that, and now the bad part of the state is all downstate. It’s Springfield and lower. So, like they’re skyrocketing, and the evil Chicago urban zone is totally fine. So, Illinois is going up-
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I remember that. I actually remember reading comments. Never read the Facebook comments. My God. But I do it anyway, because I just want to torture myself. And someone being like, “All Pritzker’s rules, that’s for Chicago. That has nothing to do with us in downstate Illinois.”
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, guess what? Downstate’s-
Kurt Elster: Now we need to protect the city of Chicago from these darn, these rural yahoos. Oh, it’s just ridiculous.
Paul Reda: Yeah, pretty much. The part of the state I care about’s fine.
Kurt Elster: Geez. All right. The one thing that does help with the pandemic, number one, retail therapy. So, I bought… Julie and I got the big Harry Potter LEGO set, and she’ll put it together, and then I’m really excited. There’s a Shopify store called Brick Loot that sells LED lighting kits, and I have one for our Disney Cinderella castle that’s awesome. And so, I’m very looking forward to getting super fiddly and weird and putting LEDs into this Harry Potter LEGO castle.
Paul Reda: So, it’s one set.
Kurt Elster: The LEDs or the LEGO set?
Paul Reda: The LEGO set is just a single thing?
Kurt Elster: It’s a single 6,000-piece set.
Paul Reda: Okay, because they had a thing before where they had like a whole series, where it was like various famous buildings from Harry Potter.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Paul Reda: And they like connected together. Yeah. That’s kind of what they have now. They have like a town setup, where there’s a bunch of like three flats, and like big urban buildings.
Kurt Elster: I’ve seen that. When you do the full street, it looks very cool.
Paul Reda: Yeah. They all scale together and they all… You can lock them. They all have little lockers at the same parts. And I think they did the same for Harry Potter, because I knew someone that had like four of them a couple years ago.
Kurt Elster: All right. I have a list of website teardowns we’re thinking about doing, and number one on there right now is LEGO.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, we’re not gonna do LEGO in this episode.
Paul Reda: No.
Kurt Elster: But we’ll do… It’s on my list to do. I think that’ll be fun.
Paul Reda: I did my retail therapy in that the light bulbs I’m obsessed with finally came back in stock, so I bought-
Kurt Elster: All right. So, explain to me what… Because I saw these light bulbs. I have opinions on light bulbs. We joke that we could do a 20-minute set just on dad opinion light bulbs. Tell me what’s fancy about your light bulbs.
Paul Reda: All right, so my basement and a lot of my house is just can lights. It’s recessed can lighting. Can light city everywhere.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: And they’re these old 45 to 65-watt, normal, old light bulbs. And they’re all on dimmer switches. Why are they all on dimmer switches? I don’t know. Why are they all in cans? I don’t know. That’s just the way-
Kurt Elster: Hey. Dimmer switches cost more than regular switches. Be grateful that you got a bunch of free dimmer switches.
Paul Reda: I guess. So, I’ve been trying to swap them out with LED bulbs, and the thing is when LEDs dim, they just get less bright. Whereas old light bulbs, when they dim, they would get warmer, you’d get that more yellowish coloring, like sunset-type thing, and this is really big for me in the basement, because my wife goes to a bed, and she’s a loser, she goes to bed at like 9:00, 9:30, 10:00.
Kurt Elster: She is working in an ICU. She is a healthcare hero.
Paul Reda: Not during the week, though.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I see.
Paul Reda: And so, she goes to bed, so after 10:00 downstairs, that’s PT. That’s Paulie Time. And-
Kurt Elster: Paulie Time. I got you.
Paul Reda: That’s when I put on my TCM, put the lights down low, and so there are these cans that ring the whole basement, so I put those down about halfway and it’s really nice and soothing, but if I swapped them with LEDs, it would just be less bright white light. But Phillips makes canned light bulbs with… They call it like warming glow, so when you dim them, they actually get yellower like regular bulbs, and they’re awesome! And they’re impossible to find. Everyone bought them.
Kurt Elster: Because they’re that… So, you’re not the only weirdo who likes this.
Paul Reda: Yeah. No, Home Depot was out of them. They were selling them on Amazon for literally like $11 a bulb.
Kurt Elster: A little retail arbitrage action?
Paul Reda: Yeah, it was crazy. So, I actually… I used a notify me when this back in stock form on Home Depot’s website, and they did, and I bought like 18 bulbs.
Kurt Elster: You know, I love those. I also… There was a lamp in our dining room that I got because I filled out a back in stock form on Home Depot’s website, and like six months later it came back in stock. I bought it. No, I’m a big fan of those back in stock forms. I don’t know what percent of the time I fill them out, or use them, or then end up buying. But I can think of several instances where I did. But the trick is, so, all right, we’ll bring this podcast back to eCommerce. In Shopify, many themes support a back in stock form. But the default, the way it works, and it’s no fault of their own, they just don’t really have a choice. It just sends you an email to the merchant, and then it’s up to you to figure out what to do with it.
So, you gotta swap that thing out for something that automates it. So, there’s several apps that do it. There’s one that’s aptly named Back In Stock. That’s like the original. Or if you’re on Klaviyo, this is a function that’s built into Klaviyo. It’s like Klaviyo Back in Stock. You have to add a little bit of code to your theme to do it, but you’ve done that a bunch. What does that look like? As far as… You know. Effort.
Paul Reda: Well, it’s very easy. I mean, Klaviyo just gives you the snippet. All you have to do, there’s like a Klaviyo API key or whatever, that’s special to your account, that you have to paste into the JavaScript part of the snippet. So, you just put that on your page, and it injects it where it thinks it should go in the product form. It’ll be like right below the add to cart, where the add to cart button would be. But also, they include a thing where if it doesn’t show up the way you want it, where you want it to show up, they just give you a div with an ID in it, and you just paste that wherever you want on your page. It shows up there. It’s very easy. It’s a 15-minute thing for me. And unlike a lot of other apps that are like, “Turnkey, it just shows up where you want it to show up.” That… It actually works.
Like 90% of the time, it goes in the right spot. And if it doesn’t, you can put it in the right spot yourself easy.
Kurt Elster: So, if you’re on Klaviyo and you don’t have this set up, you don’t pay anything extra for it. It’s just a native Klaviyo feature. You make this one easy theme customization and then you set up the back-in-stock flow in Klaviyo, and then whenever people sign up, they’re on your email list. And then if that product comes back in stock, they get an email about it.
Now, I will say be careful testing. Years ago, I was working… This was early in our Shopify career. I was working on RecycledFirefighter.com, and wonderful merchant Jake Starr emails me and says, “Hey, in your testing, it’s cool, just FYI, you marked… You changed the availability on a product from out of stock to in stock, and it emailed everyone who’d signed up to be notified when it was back in stock.” And it was just me testing, so that… I have never made that same mistake twice.
All right, we’ve got… This is a pretty good cold open. One last shout out I have to do. I’m proud of myself. I’m wearing entirely Shopify merchant apparel. So, the jeans are like the sweatpants-feeling jeans that I’ve talked about before that I love from Aviator on Shopify, and I’ll throw that… I’m putting that in the show notes. I’m typing right here. Kurt’s favorite jeans. And so, I love these jeans, I’m wearing those, but I have paired it with socks, underwear and a shirt from Unbound Merino, Dan Demsky’s store, who was on this podcast a month ago, I think? And he was very kind. He sent me a bunch of his stuff. But the catch is it’s Merino wool, and Merino’s wool magic is that it doesn’t smell. And in the past, I’ve owned like a Merino wool hoodie, and in the hoodie, all right, it didn’t smell, but I’m wearing a shirt under it. So, to test, I messaged him, I said, “How long can I wear this stuff?” Weird question, “How long can I wear it before it smells?”
He goes, “You know, it’s like jeans. You’ll know in your heart when it’s time to was them.” He’s like, “But if it’s the socks and you’re just wearing them without shoes outside, wash them.” So, I am now on day four or five of wearing these… The underwear, I’m changing, but I’m on day five with the socks and day three with the shirt. They’re still clean. They don’t smell. So, at this point, I just gotta keep going, right?
Paul Reda: All I heard, took from that, was that you smell.
Kurt Elster: I’m not changing my clothing.
Paul Reda: That you’re not changing your clothes and you smell.
Kurt Elster: I really am like huffing these socks. Look, I don’t leave my house anymore. It’s fine. The only reason I’m wearing clothes is for you. All right, we’ll talk eCommerce today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. I’m your host, Kurt Elster. Joining me is my cohost, Paul Reda, lovely man that he is, and on today’s episode, we discuss what an accessibility lawsuit costs. The return of Google PageSpeed and why it’s bad. I hate that thing. And building better blog pages in Shopify, and we’ll be joined by a special guest, pulled from my pool of guests in my host, so okay, it’s my wife.
Paul Reda: It’s not Kennedy? It’s not the three-year-old?
Kurt Elster: It’s not my three-year-old.
Paul Reda: Oh, well.
Kurt Elster: My three-year-old would be like, “Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha, ha…” She’s just a chucklehead who thinks farts are funny. And I don’t judge.
Paul Reda: Just like daddy.
Kurt Elster: Yes. I was gonna say. She got it from somewhere. I don’t judge. And then finally, if we have time, we’ll do a teardown of the official Minor League Baseball store. Paul’s white whale.
Paul Reda: What do you mean if we have time? That’s the only thing I showed up for.
Kurt Elster: All right. We’ll do it no matter what. Okay, so we did, we talked about on two episodes ago, you and I, we talked about accessibility on a show, and things have gotten weirder, so right at like days after that, some more prominent accessibility lawsuits were filed. What up with that?
Paul Reda: You put it on the thing. I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: You know, I send you the show notes in advance. I was supposed to go, “What up with that?” And then you recap it for me, like, “All right, well, these guys got sued.”
Paul Reda: Well, I know what I sent you, Home Depot got sued, I believe.
Kurt Elster: It was Home Depot, Gimlet Media, the big podcaster.
Paul Reda: Oh, Gimlet Media, the big podcaster, yeah. And someone else. I don’t remember who. But what all these things have in common is that they all have video or audio content that they do not provide transcriptions or closed captionings for on their websites. Obviously, home depot, they have a lot of how-to videos, they have a lot of stuff on the product pages. Gimlet Media has podcasts, so they just have it’s all audio content, wall to wall. And deaf users are unable to figure out what’s going on in that content, and they are suing. They have gotten sued by one guy who is filing a ton of these lawsuits and they’re probably gonna either need to add transcripts to their stuff or settle.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And what blows my mind about this is-
Paul Reda: I mean, this is easy. I mean, the stuff we talked about two weeks ago, that’s hard shit. That’s a moving target. You don’t know what you’re doing. It’s very scary. This-
Kurt Elster: Trying to get a theme to… The accessibility guidelines set by the consortium; it’s called WCAG 2.1. Trying to get a Shopify theme to meet 100% of WCAG 2.1 is hard and expensive. I checked the work logs for your efforts in the past and it’s about… It’s minimum eight hours to do this, depending on the theme, and then on top of it, you still need to make your accessibility statement and you still need to have an accessibility toolbar, like accessiBe, and then it’s still an ongoing effort to maintain the content with alt tags and transcriptions.
So, we transcribe the video and audio for this. How do we do it?
Paul Reda: Well, and it would be way more than eight, because on those projects, we didn’t really go extremely deep into the weeds, and like we just kind of used a checker, an automated checker from another website. We didn’t have an actual visual-impaired person try to buy something. That wasn’t part of our task list. So, just-
Kurt Elster: So, actually, in KeySmart’s case, they did do that, actually. We just weren’t involved with it.
Paul Reda: Okay.
Kurt Elster: It wasn’t us doing it, but yeah, they did do it.
Paul Reda: So, and it works?
Kurt Elster: Yes! Yeah.
Paul Reda: Oh, good.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You were successful.
Paul Reda: Oh, thank God. So, where were we?
Kurt Elster: All right, let’s… I got transcripts.
Paul Reda: Yeah, getting transcripts. Easy. You hire someone to do it. We have someone to do it. His name’s Tim.
Kurt Elster: Tim Hipp.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Tim’s a great guy. He knocks it out for us every week. He does our transcript for our podcast. He’s not expensive. It doesn’t cost a lot of money. Gimlet Media I believe got bought by Spotify, so they are just crapping cash right now, and for them to not pay for this is truly ridiculous.
Kurt Elster: What in the heck is Mr. Tim Hipp’s website? Yeah. Okay, TranscribeYourPod.com. All right, so for… Yeah, if you want a guy that you could just go to for transcriptions, and you don’t want to be… You could use a service like Rev. The problem is Rev, they got criticized heavily for they took an Uber approach, where they got all these people to transcribe for them by paying them a reasonable rate, and then once they were successful, they said, “Okay, well, we’re cutting everybody’s rates.” That didn’t go over well. I know it went badly for them and they pulled back on some things.
But it’s still like if you can, if you’re doing this as an ongoing effort, it is much better to just hire an individual freelancer for transcriptions, whereas if you need an occasional one-off thing, okay, just use Rev. Make your life easier. Also, for YouTube videos, Rev is… It pulls from the video and pushes the subtitles up for you. That’s convenient.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, and the Rev thing was a real joke because they have a lower tier, like obviously you pay a person, you’re paying more, but they have a lower tier product where you could pay an AI to do it, and the AI exists because they took all that human transcriptions and then fed it all into the AI. So, not only were the people not getting paid very much. They also were training their own robot replacements.
Kurt Elster: Oh, brutal.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it was real great. Real great move by them.
Kurt Elster: I do use that Rev automated transcription when I need something just for myself, for like my notes, for something I’m working on, to get a quick transcription. Because it’s not perfect. I’ll use it… Recently, I used it to do… I had to re-record one of our sponsor recordings, and I just wanted some plain text of it, so I threw it in Rev and immediate, like it cost me literally 60 cents, and then immediately I got the thing back, and it showed, like it’s a 30-second clip, and in there it was like Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and it was just because my tone changed, so it’s not… And it does pretty good, but definitely not the same as a human doing it, for sure.
Paul Reda: I find it funny that we’re talking about Tim and then he’s gonna be transcribing this, and then he’s gonna be like, “Hey, that’s me!”
Kurt Elster: Yes. Well, I don’t know. I like to support quality freelancers. Anyway, so if you do get hit with an accessibility lawsuit, in our group, there was someone talking about getting hit with an accessibility lawsuit and having to settle, and when I searched and I found more of these in the Shopify Plus group, and it sounds like you’re typically gonna pay about 13 grand to make it go away, and I don’t think that includes legal fees. So, figure you’re probably up to 20 grand easy if you get hit with one of these accessibility lawsuits and you don’t fight it. You’re just like, “Here’s some cash to go away.”
Paul Reda: Well, if you’re just paying them cash to go away, your attorney is not charging you 7 grand.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: To hand over the money.
Kurt Elster: All right.
Paul Reda: At least I hope not.
Kurt Elster: I’m not a lawyer.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I don’t know how this works.
Paul Reda: But yeah, and then you pay the 13 grand, which is, I don’t know, probably what it would cost you to get your site up to speed, I would think. And the 13 grand only saves you that one time.
Kurt Elster: Keep happening, can’t it?
Paul Reda: Take that 13,000 and invest it in making your site accessible. You have taught a man to fish. And now he will have fish forever.
Kurt Elster: But you’re not gonna… I don’t know. I think in most instances, you’re probably not gonna spend 13 grand making the site accessible.
Paul Reda: I don’t think… No. It’s not gonna cost 13 grand, but you understand what I’m saying.
Kurt Elster: Yes. No, absolutely. So, there has been a resurgence of an old enemy. Google PageSpeed has returned.
Paul Reda: Multiple people in the group this week.
Kurt Elster: What’s Google PageSpeed, why do I care, and why do we hate it? I hate it. It just tortures me. It tortures merchants. All for not… For the level of pain and suffering this thing inflicts on busines owners, the return is just not there.
Paul Reda: Yeah. So, Google PageSpeed is a thing that supposedly tells you how fast your site is and the things you can do to make your site faster. And it gives you this whole list of like, “Oh, well, this JavaScript is loading, that’s too bid. These images are too big. They don’t need to be. They’re too big for this slot. You could save one second if you fix that. You could save one second if you fix this. You could save five seconds if you fix that.” And then they give you a score out of 100, which for a Shopify store, is usually like 20, or like 25.
And so, everyone who has a Shopify store puts it in there, sees they get a 25, and they’re like, “Oh my God, 25 out of 100. That’s an F.” So, they freak out, and I don’t remember if it has some stuff on the right rail about how like, “Well, if you cut for every second,” that old stat. For every second you cut out of your load time, that will increase your revenue by 2% or whatever. Something like that. So that is-
Kurt Elster: Has anyone ever actually reproduced that result?
Paul Reda: I don’t think so. So, then they do that math, and they’re like, “My site’s terrible. Also, if it wasn’t terrible, I’d be a millionaire.” They just take those steps immediately.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Well, and then there’s also the threat that like… Well, if my site’s slow, it’s not gonna show up in Google searches. Which I really don’t think they’re doing that, either.
Paul Reda: No, they’re not doing that, either.
Kurt Elster: I mean, it really comes down to we’ve got… If Google has a search result, it’s got two results, and the ranking factor says, “Hey, these things rank the same, but one is faster than the other.” It will give preference to the faster one. I think that’s the perception of how it actually works in practice.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’s what I read, too, is that it’s like if it’s literally a tie, and there’s nothing else, it’s truly a tie, the one with the higher speed will go above the one with the lower speed. Not the one with the lower speed is not listed on Google. It’s you lose the tiebreaker.
Kurt Elster: Yes. And so, I think I would treat page speed the same way you would treat audio quality in a podcast. The content is what’s important. The audio quality, great audio quality doesn’t hurt. Bad audio quality doesn’t help. Like when this show, when we used $30 garbage microphones, somehow I still got listeners. With page speed, a faster site is better. Let’s make that clear. A slow site could cause people to bounce, could create problems, but if you have a site that loads in four seconds versus two seconds, or a site that loads in like three and a half versus two and a half, honestly, it really… I have yet to see a scenario where that made some dramatic difference in any metric.
And the thing is like, especially, like we’re shopping on phones. They’re all LTE now. They’re very fast. Many people’s phones are faster than their home internet connection. I’m on gigabit internet. Man, it really does not take a particularly quick internet connection to make a 5 meg website appear to load instantaneously.
Paul Reda: It’s also the fact that the Google PageSpeed score is wrong. It is not an accurate measure of speed.
Kurt Elster: No, it really isn’t.
Paul Reda: They don’t.
Kurt Elster: It’s an arbitrary checklist of recommendations. A Google engineer’s fever dream of best practices for server configuration, and then it checks your site against that, and that’s what a lot of that score is based on. But not all of it is practical, applicable, or sane for a Shopify store.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And I mean, they have this whole thing, like I just loaded up one of our clients in the background while you were talking. Their Google PageSpeed score is 13.
Kurt Elster: Oh my God!
Paul Reda: They got a 13 out of 100. It’s horrendous. I mean, you would think that this store is a trash pile. In the last month, they’ve done $630,000 in revenue. So, they’re gonna do over $6 million this year on their 13 Google PageSpeed score. And you know, it’s got this stuff in here. Oh, well, you could save 5 seconds if you remove all this unused JavaScript. Okay. Well, what’s the unused JavaScript? It’s their Yotpo reviews, it’s the JavaScript that runs the YouTube video on their homepage. It’s the script that does their Facebook cookieing. It’s the scripts that run their site from Shopify. I mean, none of these things are unused on this store. You need all of these things.
Kurt Elster: But it’s claimed they’re unused.
Paul Reda: It claims they’re unused. The Klaviyo script that runs their email signup forms. Like, you need those to run a site. But Google PageSpeed says, “Well, this is unused JavaScript, and you’d save 5 seconds if you got rid of all of it.” No, you wouldn’t.
Kurt Elster: No! So, we do have a client who went through, who did all of the very aggressive optimizations that Google PageSpeed recommends, and that was a year ago. It had no impact on anything other than we are still finding stuff that broke as a result, and like undoing it and fixing it to this day. It’s just maddening, because just the reality of having apps and then trying to concatenate all their JavaScript, it’s not realistic to do it without breaking things, or with being able to maintain it long term.
So, I think a fast site is important. Having a faster site is better than having a slower site. The importance of it has been overstated and Google PageSpeed insights tool as a tool for determining what is fast and slow, it’s just not a good tool.
Paul Reda: It’s wrong. It’s fully, fully wrong. You should never use it, never look at it.
Kurt Elster: I hate it. What do we do instead, and what are some sane benchmarks?
Paul Reda: Well, I’ll tell you what I do. I don’t know if it’s useful for our clients who are less tech savvy, but every web browser has something in it that’s called Inspector, or Network, or something like that. It has an Inspector window. Developer tools. Developer options. And so, what you do with those is you look at this developer options, and it has a tab on it called network usually, and you reload the page with that tab open, and it shows you everything that loads, how big it is, how long it takes, all of that.
And then the bottom, it’ll say like how long it took, how much had to be transferred, all that sort of stuff. So, I mean if you could get… And I mean, it’s not perfect either, because I mean say you have a tool that’s sort of like firing and keeping track of what the user is doing on the page. Well, if that keeps firing, and that keeps sending data back, that’s still getting registered as like the page is loading, because there is s till things loading in the background. The user is using the page fine, but that number gets escalated. So, really, I would just look at the transfer amount and the time that, I don’t know, on Firefox, there’s something where it says load on it, and what the load number is. So, generally transferred, you’d want to see that under 5. You want to see that 5 megs or under. And then load time, probably like 5 seconds or under. And if you hit both those numbers, you’re fine. You have other things to worry about on your store that are more important than getting that number lower.
And I think that’s another main part of it, is that a lot of people think that this is a problem. If you score 7s on both of them, they’re like, “Oh, this is a problem.” I mean, can you do better than 7? Yeah, probably. Are there 10 other things you could do on your store that will give you way more, bigger wins than getting that 7 down into a 5? 100%. As long as your site is not literally taking 20 seconds on every page load and people are sitting there and going, “Oh, screw this,” and leaving, you’ve pretty much solved the issue already.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so use common sense. Be sane about it. I say look at… Yeah, the tool I like is Pingdom tools. Tools.Pingdom.com. Again, I’m linking to that in the show notes. It’s still gonna give you a score. Don’t pay attention to the letter grade. You’ll make yourself crazy. But looking at… It’s worthwhile to see what’s the total page size, and then try and get that down by reviewing like, “Okay, what’s the biggest image on this. Do we need that? Can we make it smaller?” Et cetera.
Paul Reda: Well, the images, the images problem has been solved a lot by Shopify transitioning all their images on the stores to WebP, which is a new, modern image format that drastically slices the size of images down. You don’t have to do anything extra. Shopify does it all on their servers. So, it serves WebP images to the end user, which has caused a huge drop in load times. It’s been really great. And in the new version of iOS and Apple Safari will finally support WebP this fall, and that was the main problem was still, was that people on their iPhones were not getting the WebP images, and that’ll change in like September or October.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Sweet. Yeah, that was the one thing that was not working with it, and now it is. So, just give me some benchmarks for page size in megabytes, and then we’ll move on.
Paul Reda: I went over that when you weren’t listening.
Kurt Elster: Oh, sorry. Okay, good. Well, the reason I wasn’t listening was I was trying to get my wife in here, who is our resident Shopify blogger, and yeah, Google PageSpeed tortures merchants. The other thing I see come up as a frequent complaint that I don’t understand, but I know there are options and solutions to fix this problem for merchants is the Shopify blog. Merchants love to complain about the Shopify blogging feature, and I don’t get it, like it works just fine for me. I have no issues with it. But my wife has a Shopify store with hundreds of pages that are pages and blog posts. Let’s see. Yeah, 627 pages on her site, DoubleYourWDW. And so, I wanted to talk to her since she, probably more than anyone else I know, has used this thing to blog.
Mrs. Elster, thank you for joining us.
Julie Elster: Hello!
Kurt Elster: So, now you’re on the other side of the table, because you also record a podcast in here.
Julie Elster: I do. It’s weird being on this side.
Kurt Elster: So, tell me about your experience with Shopify as a CMS. Like what, do you like it? Does it frustrate you? What would you change about it?
Julie Elster: I have no issues with it. I think sometimes photos can give me trouble.
Kurt Elster: Okay. That one I’ve heard.
Julie Elster: But I’m really curious what complaints do people have about the blog? It’s pretty straightforward. I’m like the least technical person out there, and I can figure this out and post a blog and get a ton of traffic, so what are the complaints, exactly?
Kurt Elster: Well, I think number one, I think you’re probably more technical than you realize.
Julie Elster: Well, thank you.
Kurt Elster: You’re using Artisan theme by Out of the Sandbox, which has really nice page layouts, and then on top of that, I tweaked that theme with some extra rules, like images are always forced to 100% width in articles or pages, and we also did some nice tweaking just to the text itself, for readability. I think it worked out pretty well, but the layout that you use is really like image, headline, text, list. It’s all single column, and I think what people are doing is trying to do like fancy magazines. Maybe they’re trying to do fancy magazine-style layouts, and if you want to do like float an image left-right and try and make that work responsive. All right, you could quickly get yourself into trouble with that, I think.
Julie Elster: I think you’re wasting your time. Like why mess with that? Okay, so I’m not somebody who sits and watches YouTube videos, or okay, I record a podcast, but I don’t listen to podcasts. I read. I read blogs. I read articles constantly. I don’t get the need for these goofy layouts, trying to make a blog look like a magazine. I think you’re wasting your time.
Kurt Elster: You think it’s a gimmick.
Julie Elster: Yes. It is.
Kurt Elster: Honestly, whether anyone wants to admit it or not, I think it’s an excuse to not have to put in the work. Like a blog post that is going to drive organic traffic, it’s gonna do really well, has to be like an ultimate guide kind of thing. Needs to be 2,000 words. Well, who wants to put in that effort?
Julie Elster: It doesn’t have to be 2,000 words.
Kurt Elster: What do you shoot for?
Julie Elster: I don’t shoot for anything in particular. I don’t ever shoot for anything. I’m writing to get content out there, and if I can make my point in a very short, succinct article, then I’m going to do that. I’m not gonna waste somebody’s time with 2,000 words and 40 photos in a goofball layout if I can get to the point quickly and succinctly. So, I think that people are overcomplicating blogs is what it sounds like.
Kurt Elster: I know you’re right. I just needed someone who does-
Julie Elster: I was very curious when you told me you wanted me to talk on this, because I’m like, “Well, what issues do people have?” I just… I write to answer the questions that people have. So, if somebody has a question, I’m going to research or I’m going to write to whatever my knowledge is on that, and it doesn’t matter if it’s 200 words or 2,000 words. If I have a nice photo to go with it, I’ll put nice photos in there, but I’m not going to lose sleep over layout and all of that. It’s just the point is to get relevant information out there, and the point is to get people to find you in Google searches. So, I think people are probably just overcomplicating.
Kurt Elster: Certainly. But one of the things… Well, some of the tools that people use are like landing page builders, like Shogun or Zipify pages, and that really feels like overcomplicating it.
Julie Elster: I don’t know what either of those are.
Kurt Elster: It’s like a drag-and-drop page builder, so you can make it look how you want.
Julie Elster: Oh, okay.
Kurt Elster: There’s a new one that just came out, we’ll give them the plug. I think it’s called Blog Creator for Shopify. Very straightforward name. I just saw it on Product Hunt this week. It says, “Level-up your Shopify blog with the first CMS purpose-built for eCommerce.” All right, Shopify is a CMS, and they say, “Create blog posts that convert readers into subscribers.” How? “Easily distribute content to social and email. Measure your results with analytics.” All right, those all sound good, but how-
Julie Elster: Yeah, how does an app convert readers into subscribers? Because-
Kurt Elster: All right. Well, I need to… So, for subscribers, yours does that, because we have a newsletter opt-in built into it.
Julie Elster: Yes, but I also end everything with like, “You have questions?”
Kurt Elster: A call to action.
Julie Elster: Yeah, like if you have questions, you can go here. If you need more information, here’s where you can go. So, I always end it with, “Here are next steps,” for the couple of things that I’m looking to have the reader do.
Kurt Elster: Here. They say, “Embed products and collections in your blog posts.” Well, actually some themes support that now using short codes. Or you could customize it to support it. Honestly, I think it’s just a lack of education. Clearly, Shopify’s focus is not on the blogging side of it, so they’re not… No one’s producing a ton of exciting content around like, “Here’s a screencast of understanding the basics of HTML CSS to make this look the way you want it without having to use all this nonsense.” Right?
Julie Elster: So, recently, and I’m sure you’ve talked about this quite a bit, and I know Paul knows, I adopted a bunny. And-
Kurt Elster: Love that bunny.
Paul Reda: I know all about the bunny.
Kurt Elster: We love the bunny! Mary Hoppins.
Julie Elster: The bunny’s so sweet. But a bunny is a ton of work, like a ton of work, and there was so much I didn’t know about bunnies. And so, in researching it, I kept coming across this blog and it was… Gosh, what’s the name? Small Pet Select, is that what it is?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, Small Pet Select. They’re a Shopify store.
Julie Elster: Yes. Yeah, and they have an amazing blog. And so, now they’re my go-to for information. Also, for Timothy hay and bunny treats.
Kurt Elster: And that has-
Julie Elster: They have the best bunny information on their blog, and when I have Googled healthy bunny treats, or bunny behaviors, what does it mean when my bunny’s doing this or that, their blog keeps coming up, and I have purchased from them multiple times. So, I think a blog is definitely helpful, and they’re not doing anything insane. They have a few photos. It’s just straightforward, like is your bunny kicking its feet? Here’s what that means. Is your bunny clawing at its cage? Here’s what that means. It’s very straightforward.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Oh, yeah. I see they got a bunch of posts in here, and they’ve got it organized by animal. So, here, we’ll link to it.
Julie Elster: Yeah, their blog is great.
Kurt Elster: However, I will point out, their blog is… This appears to be WordPress and Shopify is on a subdomain.
Julie Elster: Oh, so they’re using a different blog.
Kurt Elster: Different blogging platform.
Julie Elster: Well, whatever. It got me to their store. The point is blogging got me to their store.
Kurt Elster: Yes. And I’m guessing they’re using it for like organization, but we’ve done this with a Shopify blog. The Shopify blog supports multiple blogs, and it supports tagging. Well, between the two of those, you can easily do categorization. In fact, I’ll actually… I will link in the show notes to a Shopify store with a really impressive, fancy blog. Can You Handlebar is the brand, the website, and their amazing blog is called The Beard Mentor, and they’ve got a ton of quality content. There is no app, there is nothing crazy here. This thing is run entirely in the Shopify blog platform, so I will include that in the show notes.
So, Ms. Julie, your advice here is blog prolifically to see results. Don’t get obsessed with the format. The content, the substance is way more important than the style. And just focus on answering your readers’ questions.
Julie Elster: Yes. And if you see that people are searching for certain things, or you keep popping up for this one specific thing, double down on that. That’s the thing you should be writing more about. Clearly, people want to know more about it, so-
Kurt Elster: And you rank for it.
Julie Elster: Yeah. Yeah. Double down on it. Just get them to your site by giving them good information about your products, or stuff surrounding your products.
Kurt Elster: Excellent advice.
Julie Elster: Thank you.
Kurt Elster: You are dismissed. Paul and I have a teardown to do.
Julie Elster: Okay. It’s been fun. Bye, Paul.
Kurt Elster: Thank you.
Paul Reda: Bye, Julie.
Kurt Elster: All right. Do you have any comment on that, or do you want to jump into Minor League Baseball?
Paul Reda: I have no opinion on that, so we’re done.
Kurt Elster: Excellent. So, let’s do a Minor League Baseball teardown.
Paul Reda: My white whale.
Kurt Elster: What’s the URL for this?
Paul Reda: It is MILBStore.com.
Kurt Elster: Got it. All right. I’ve got a screencast going. I’ve got MILBStore.com open in front of me. I’m looking at the homepage. What am I doing here? What am I shopping for today?
Paul Reda: All right, so this is the store for Minor League Baseball. For those of you that don’t know what Minor League Baseball is, there’s all the baseball teams that you know in all the big cities, the 30 Major League Baseball teams. Each of those teams has five or six different Minor League affiliates, that are guys that are coming up, that are younger, or that will never be in the majors, but they play in smaller towns across America. Unfortunately, there is no Minor League Baseball this year due to COVID. They’ve just decided to cancel it and I’m gonna give no comment on that.
And the people that watch the videos know I like buying shirts from them, because it’s all these weird team names, and weird logos, and I always think they’re very fun. If you’re watching the video today, I’m wearing my Staten Island Pizza Rats shirt, which is not an actual team. It was a promo the Staten Island Yankees did. So, MILB Store was terrible for many years. Five years ago, even up until last year, it was built on top of ColdFusion. It was horrendous. It was one of the worst stores I’ve ever interacted with in my life, and I made it my mission to get it on Shopify, because I think it should have been on Shopify. To the point where I was finding people that worked at Shopify at Unite and being like, “Hey, we should work together and get MILB as a single entity on one single store for all the 150 different teams. There should just be one store that’s a clearinghouse.”
And they kind of like backed away from me and were very frightened by me, because I was too excited.
Kurt Elster: Six-foot-four monster of a man comes out of nowhere and goes, “Hey, you work at Shopify, right? We gotta get the MILB on Shopify! We gotta do it! Okay!” That’s what they saw. It’s just you towering over them, yelling about the MILB store. They’re like, “I have to go. I have to stand over here now.”
Paul Reda: But anyway, so in like April, I loaded up the store to look at if there was any cool new stuff to buy, and lo and behold, it was a brand new store on Shopify. They went and did it without me. Those jerks. How dare they? I’m very mad about it. So, we’re gonna be looking at this store, and I think the interesting thing to look at is let’s think about this, there are 150 different teams. Let’s say each team has what, 50 products? So, if there are 150 teams and each team has 50 products, that is a 7,500 product catalog. And it’s more-
Kurt Elster: It’s a beefy store.
Paul Reda: It’s more than that.
Kurt Elster: I scrolled to the bottom of the site, and it does not have an accessibility statement.
Paul Reda: Oh, that’s bad.
Kurt Elster: Uh oh.
Paul Reda: Oh no. No good.
Kurt Elster: In fact, I’m just gonna Control-F. No. No. And no accessibility app. Ooh.
Paul Reda: They’re in trouble.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I would do something about that one quickly. Okay, so I’m on the homepage. I’m at the top of the page.
Paul Reda: So, I think the key here is let’s… First thing, make sure your screen’s wide enough, because this thing hamburgers really fast. If you get below 1300 pixels, it hamburgers.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: But-
Kurt Elster: I’m at 1920 by 1080 for the sake of the screencast.
Paul Reda: All right. Hover over Shop by Team.
Kurt Elster: Yeah!
Paul Reda: So, there’s your problem.
Kurt Elster: One, two, three, four, five. All right, there are six columns. Each column has how many items in it?
Paul Reda: I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Many. And the whole list is at 14-point font.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, I’m gonna be honest. I think this is a good way of doing it, because when you-
Kurt Elster: It has the little icons on there, which I think is nice.
Paul Reda: Yeah. When you have this many teams, I can’t think of a better way of doing it. You could search for caps. I mean, you could hover the other ones. It’s like men, women, kids, caps, novelties, collections, whatever.
Kurt Elster: But realistically, I’m shopping by team, aren’t I?
Paul Reda: I think the better thing, and this is that bar on top, it’s shop by affiliation. So, click on shop by affiliation.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it’s a button at the top of this dropdown menu. Shop by affiliation.
Paul Reda: I think it should be more prominent even.
Kurt Elster: It should be… Well, if this the easiest, best way to do it, and a majority of people do it, it should be a parent element in the main menu.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And it can even be a button, like, “Hey, we’ve got…” One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. “We’ve got nine items in the main menu.” Oh my gosh. They all make sense, but if there’s like one obvious one and you’ve got kind of a big, harder to navigate catalog. I was gonna say confusing. It’s not really confusing, there’s just a lot to it. So, this was not an easy task for anybody. I’m not envious of whoever had to figure this out.
Paul Reda: No, and that was the thing. Every time I ranted about it in the office, you were like, “How are you gonna do it? Do you understand? It’s like herding cats. It’s 150 different companies doing business as one company.”
Kurt Elster: Yeah. No, it’s a weird scenario. Okay, so shop by affiliation. If it’s a good experience, that button should just be in the main menu. It could be the first thing.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so I-
Kurt Elster: So, I’ll click that guy.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so I think this is the way to do it. All right, let’s say I’m a White Sox fan. If I’m a White Sox fan, here are all the MLB teams, all their Minor League affiliates, and I could say, “Well, I want to be a cool hipster White Sox fan and have gear from their Minor League teams.” So, I think that’s the way to do it. And you know, the icons do these little bounce things, that’s cool. You can flip between the AL and the NL, so we can just pick a White Sox team. Let’s pick the Kannapolis Cannon Ballers, and then we’re in the Kannapolis-
Kurt Elster: Hold on, so do I, under shop by… You lost me. I’ve got my filter. Shop by affiliation has this cool filter at the top, American League or National League.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Which one?
Paul Reda: AL. The one you’re already on.
Kurt Elster: Okay. All right.
Paul Reda: And you see the White Sox?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: All right. Now, click on the Kannapolis Cannon Ballers under the White Sox, because we are hypothetical White Sox fans.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Gotcha. Oh, and I like… All right, so then when I land on the collection for the Cannon Ballers, it’s got a nice banner across the top that matches. There was a ribbon or a banner that just disappeared on me.
Paul Reda: Oh, that was like a shipping thing.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah. Sign up for emails and score 10% off, and then eventually it went away?
Paul Reda: Yeah. It’s weird. It bounces around.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: So, here you have your general Cannon Baller gear, and I’m gonna get in a little weeds here to tell you how they did this. So, you have on the left, I think this is very well done. This column on the left side, you have brand, who cares about brand, I don’t care if it was made by Nike or New Era, who gives a shit? Why do they include-
Kurt Elster: But some people will have like, especially if you buy a lot of sports gear, you probably… Especially… And sizing is the thing. You’re like, “I’ve got this one shirt or jersey that it fits well, it feels good, I like it.” So, for people who buy a lot of sports apparel, they could have opinions on brand.
Paul Reda: All right. But then you got department, you got all the different kinds of things that they sell. You could narrow it down by infants, kids, men, women, toddlers. That sort of stuff. And I think, and like cap type, I think that’s really good, and the way they did this is… Let’s click on t-shirts on that left rail on the bottom. This is all tag based, so we’re all… The collection we’re in is the Kannapolis Cannon Ballers collection, and then this left-
Kurt Elster: And it’s filter by tag.
Paul Reda: And this is all just filtering by tag. And you-
Kurt Elster: So, I… What theme do you think they built this on?
Paul Reda: Oh, I have no idea. I’m assuming it’s entirely custom, because this Snow Commerce company is… It was built by this company called Snow Commerce. I think they’re pretty fancy, so maybe they did it all themselves. I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: I’ll include Snow Commerce in our show notes. Why not?
Paul Reda: I hate them, but in like the nicest way. They’re like my nemesis, where it’s like we’re frienemies, because they also did-
Kurt Elster: I don’t think they know that or care.
Paul Reda: They don’t, but they also did the Star Trek store, which obviously I’m also very into, and I’m like-
Kurt Elster: That’s on the short list after LEGO.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, I will say, all right, you’re right. This is the… In Shopify, you can filter collection by tag easily, and then you can do like a sidebar powered off link lists if you wanted to. That’s what they’ve got going here. The limitation here is it’s all mutually exclusive, like you can only pick one thing at a time.
Paul Reda: No. Kannapolis, you click t-shirts, right?
Kurt Elster: Oh, it does. I see… Yeah, it’ll add a second tag to it.
Paul Reda: Yeah. You could add a second tag. It’ll just put plus and then add like shop for men, and now you’ll only get the men’s t-shirts.
Kurt Elster: But you know, I did it, and it popped me into, “Sorry, there’s no products available at this time.” And it has a cool .gif, and then weirdly they did an embed from GIPHY, so if you hover over it, it’s like an ad for GIPHY and other .gifs. Probably should have just put the .gif in there natively. But I like that we do a cute thing. What would work, like the way to upgrade this is use an app, like Product Filter and Search by Booster Apps. We’ve used that in a couple stores. I like it a lot. We could have that. That would make this filter be a lot saner, because out of the box, you could do collapsible menus, you can have it… There’s different selection types, much more obvious, and you’re doing combining filters, and it’ll show, like it’ll automatically remove combos that have zero products. It would work like this, but better.
Paul Reda: It worked fine for me. I clicked-
Kurt Elster: No!
Paul Reda: I was on t-shirts and then clicked shop for men and it only gave me the men’s shirts.
Kurt Elster: All right, so I’ve got-
Paul Reda: I thought this worked out great using only the stock Shopify tools.
Kurt Elster: All right, fine.
Paul Reda: The name of this theme, by the way, is MILBTeamVersion2.3, so that sounds like a custom theme to me.
Kurt Elster: All right, all right. Which shirt should I pick?
Paul Reda: Well, apparently the name of the Cannon Ballers mascot is Boomer, so they’re selling Ok Boomer tees, which is pretty fun.
Kurt Elster: Oh, look at that.
Paul Reda: I like this Red Roundel tee. The first one. I like that a lot. Kannapolis-
Kurt Elster: I don’t see an Ok Boomer tee. Oh, there it is. I’m clicking the Ok Boomer tee.
Paul Reda: All right.
Kurt Elster: I don’t see product reviews on… Yeah, there’s no product reviews on this thing.
Paul Reda: Well, and I think it’s a very long tail. There’s a lot of products, but I don’t think a lot of products sell a lot.
Kurt Elster: And especially if you’re using like print on demand, like this Ok Boomer shirt is clearly a mockup. With a catalog this big, I don’t blame them. Trying to print and photograph all of these would be a nightmare in itself.
Paul Reda: Well, and that was the problem before. I mean, it was clearly like a person in the Kannapolis Intimidators Stadium store with an iPhone camera taking photos of the t-shirts, and they were all different aspect ratios. It was horrendous. It was truly like 1997 level was the old store, so this is a gigantic improvement.
Kurt Elster: Okay. And so, knowing that they’re coming from this outdated platform, and they’ve got a big catalog to deal with, we have to cut them some slack on anything that’s like… would involve touching every single product. Like you just have to try and do as much in a database or a CSV as you can. So, the product, I’m looking at the Ok Boomer tee, and there’s a few issues.
So, I notice at the end of the product description, it just says item number, and then there’s no item number.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I don’t know, like clearly that was a mistake. Probably it’s just supposed to show the SKU, right?
Paul Reda: Yeah. That is not in the description. That’s its own entity, so that’s just been like not entered for that product, or the Liquid’s wrong, or something.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Yeah, so that’s an easy fix, but it’s a bug in the template. I’ve got social share buttons directly under the product form. Nothing could make me crazier.
Paul Reda: And social share buttons above, below the-
Kurt Elster: No, those aren’t share buttons. Those are just links to-
Paul Reda: Oh, those are links to-
Kurt Elster: MILB.
Paul Reda: Oh, God.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so I don’t want all these links that are like, “Hey, go to these other networks you’re addicted to,” when I’m this close to making a purchase decision.
Paul Reda: And so, as someone struggling with these shirts, I bought some of these shirts, like my Lehigh Valley IronPigs shirt is too small for me, because they don’t have sizing guides-
Kurt Elster: A size guide. Nothing. There’s no size info at all.
Paul Reda: I mean, I’m sure their biggest sellers here are all apparel related. You need to have a sizing guide.
Kurt Elster: Of course. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah, so that’s… Conversion rate optimization wise, you want to start with busting objections. And on an apparel store, sizing and returns are gonna be the biggest objections. So, I’m looking at this product and it is not, even though I could sort by who the vendor was, it does not tell me what the shirt is printed on, it does not tell me what the shirt is made out of. It doesn’t tell me how the sizing works. And it doesn’t tell me what happens if it doesn’t fit. Those are the most obvious objections you’re gonna get with purchasing apparel online. And for a store that is… Figured it’s got 7,500 products, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that at least 5,000 are t-shirts.
Paul Reda: Oh, you have no idea. If you click on novelties or whatever, there’s like… There’s 3,000 products there. And so yeah, they also have… I love this Red Roundel tee that they’re selling. I’d really like to buy that. I need like a 2XL or a 3XL. They’re both out of stock. And as we talked about before, if I try to select those sizings, it just does nothing. On Ok Boomer, 3XL is out of stock. There’s no back in stock form for me to fill out or anything. I’m probably not gonna get this shirt, because they’re like they don’t have it, I don’t know if they’re ever gonna have it ever again.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that’s an easy… So far, the homepage, the navigation, I think they were tasked with an extremely difficult thing and did very well. The collection page is good. You think it’s great. I think Product Filter and Search app, or some kind of filtering app would plus it. And then on the product detail page is where things a little bit fall on their face.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Without a doubt. I think it’s pretty much like, “Here’s a shirt. Buy it or don’t.” Like there’s no-
Kurt Elster: Well, here. I landed on… I switched to the Red Roundel tee. I was on the Ok Boomer tee before. That one, this one has a shorter logo, but a much more useful logo. First it describes it, like alt text style. Red short sleeve tee with “Roundel” logo. All right, that’s some SEO action. And then says, “Made by Gildan. 100% cotton.” Okay, already that’s more info than I had on the other one, so I think it’s… The issues we’re seeing are just around the sheer size of the product catalog.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and I think… I don’t know how they’re set up, but I was like, again, is it herding cats? Like there’s 150 different merchandising people in 150 different cities across America who are uploading this all to this store?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Yeah. There isn’t someone in St. Petersburg or whatever just being like, “This is bad. We gotta get all these. We’re working on all of these.”
Kurt Elster: So, it’s easy for us from the outside to say like, “Oh, just do this. Just do that.” But I think it’s important to acknowledge the organizational difficulties that are behind those recommendations when you’re dealing with what’s essentially like a giant professional association that also happens to have an eCommerce store.
Paul Reda: Yeah. This is like a marketplace site almost, when you think about it.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: One more thing on this trust bar. We call these a trust bar, underneath the add to cart-
Kurt Elster: The badges.
Paul Reda: The badges.
Kurt Elster: It says secure checkout, friendly returns, fast shipping. We call that the trust bar. Yeah.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I would like to know what friendly returns mean. I mean, you talked about it before. I mean, if I buy that 2XL shirt and it’s too small, how bad are you gonna ding me?
Kurt Elster: For example, like yeah, the phrase friendly returns could mean anything. As in, I ask to return it and you say, “No, thank you.” Like when my children were younger, you ask them to do something, they’d go, “No, thank you.” And then we got mad. They’d go, “I used my manners.” Yeah, you’re right. So, that trust returns badge, A, it uses this great color. It doesn’t quite match the site. The whole thing is one big image. It’s just a graphic.
Paul Reda: Oh, geez.
Kurt Elster: For three things.
Paul Reda: I didn’t notice that.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, and I don’t think it has alt text on it, either, which… So, not ideal for accessibility. Yeah, and actually the… No, I’m sorry. It has an alt tag. The alt tag just says trust badge.
Paul Reda: All right, I take it back. We could have done a better job than these guys. Snow Commerce, we’re coming for you.
Kurt Elster: Oh my gosh. Take it back. I don’t… No. I’m not in a competition here. Or just add some alt text. They did the hard part, was figuring out how to do this menu. Yeah. No, this trust badge feels… The way it’s implemented feels like an afterthought. It could be improved. All right, what happens if I add to cart?
Paul Reda: We got a modal cart that pops up.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: That’s fine.
Kurt Elster: And then it weirdly says, “You have one item in your cart,” like dead center in the cart. And then it disappears on me and my cart, the badge on the page didn’t update until I… So, I clicked through. Now I’m on the cart page.
Paul Reda: Yeah. It doesn’t AJAX the number of items in your cart.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. There’s some other weird things that happen here in the cart, like they’ve got a note in here. “Have a discount code? Continue to checkout to redeem it.” So, that tells you that was like a customer service thing, where people were confused and kept asking. We’ve got below that, the Shopify default note. Shipping and taxes calculated at checkout. Whenever I can, I remove this thing and replace it with a free shipping calculator. I don’t see anything on here about free shipping, what their free shipping threshold is.
It says checkout. I always rename this thing proceed to checkout, because it’s more accurate. And then underneath the checkout button, do you see this?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: It says, “Shipping outside of the USA?” And then there’s nothing there. Like it’s just… It’s a rhetorical question. Shipping outside the USA? And then it’s just like this orphan text. It’s a little weird. So, I don’t know if that was supposed to be a link or what was supposed to go there.
Paul Reda: Yeah, I don’t know. That has a class on it called alt, so I don’t know if that’s supposed to be connected to a button or something. I don’t know.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I don’t know. That’s a little odd. And then there’s the notes, they renamed it, “Special delivery instructions or gift message.” So, I generally prefer to remove the notes, but if I have to include them, certainly I want to instead of just having it be like, “Include a message,” I want it to specify what the message is for, and they’ve done that. The only way I think to improve it a little more would be if it were like an accordion, where I click it, I click that note to open the input box. I view it as a distraction. I’d rather not have it.
Paul Reda: So, we click checkout.
Kurt Elster: In checkout, they put their logo in. Fantastic! They’ve got the express checkout stuff in here. Great. They don’t require my phone number. They don’t have the company field. Good. And then the continue to shipping button is a color I don’t think the website uses.
Paul Reda: Yeah. I would like to see a little bit more styling here. I mean, the big one is you gotta get that logo up there, because otherwise it’s just like Helvetica font being like MILB Store. And that doesn’t give a lot of confidence. But yeah, I think the right rail, that grey area, they could make that-
Kurt Elster: The order summary field.
Paul Reda: The order summary field, they could make that the blue from the navigation or whatever, and then all of the buttons on the front end of this store were all red, so I feel like that continue to shipping button should also continue being red.
Kurt Elster: You know what would be cool, the way I might do this is in that order summary, you do like a repeating graphic of the logo badge graphic, and do it faded, so it’s kind of like a watermark. It’d be cool.
Paul Reda: Yeah. That’d be cool.
Kurt Elster: A really good example of that is on Harney.com. They had a monogram logo that they use on their giftwrap, and so I made that into a repeating pattern and put that in the order summary, and it’s like real faded and subtle. It’s very cool. I’m sure most people don’t even… They just overlook it.
Paul Reda: Fancy.
Kurt Elster: I see it and I love it.
Paul Reda: And that’s what matters.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Of course. That’s what you want to hear. Back on that homepage, scrolling through the homepage, looks pretty good. The featured promo section, I think they did a really nice job on that, where it’s like shop apparel, shop caps. They’re kind of trying to divide me, steer me up. They’ve got their face masks as a featured thing. They’ve got trending products as preorders. I think that’s great.
They do something unusual. They have auctions on the site, and like right in here it’s like, “Oh, closes in.” That’s cool. That took some effort. But when you click through, it takes you off the Shopify store. It runs on its own thing it looks like.
Paul Reda: Oh, it goes to MILB Auctions, which yeah, is its own thing.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. But knowing the disaster that was the previous online experience, to this, I think they did a phenomenally good job with it, and there’s just… Trying to deal with a catalog this huge is difficult.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Huge, huge upgrade from zero. And if you click on the… Go to the masks. Click on the Hillsboro Hops mask. I have a Hillsboro Hops shirt. That was one of the first ones I got. I love it.
Kurt Elster: I recognize it. You’ve worn that so much, it’s got that… Like the silk screening’s starting to crack. I’m very familiar with the Hops shirt.
Paul Reda: So, yeah, the Hops product at least has a much better description.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so yeah, this does speak to the idea that their issues are just related to trying to deal with that huge catalog, and so I think… I don’t think this is Snow Commerce. I think it’s Snow Commerce said, “Hey, here’s the right way to do it.” And then it’s up to MILB to go through thousands of products and update them. So, you’re right, looking at a new product, it’s got a nice description, the item number works. Okay, that’s much better.
Paul Reda: I didn’t say it was Snow Commerce.
Kurt Elster: Well, yeah, you also declared that now we’re in a battle.
Paul Reda: We are. Shut up.
Kurt Elster: Well, all right. Fine. Then you can challenge them to a rap battle. I’m staying out of this.
Paul Reda: They stole my dreams. No. Yeah, I just think MILB is not well versed in having a well-run single point of commerce for all their affiliates.
Kurt Elster: Right. This is a huge upgrade for them. Anything else of note on this site before we wrap it up?
Paul Reda: I don’t think so.
Kurt Elster: Cool. All right. We’ll end it there. If someone were to go buy a shirt, what would be the one you recommend?
Paul Reda: Well, my favorite, I always like Monty Biscuit, who is the mascot of the Montgomery Biscuits, and I don’t know if they have a Monty Biscuit shirt, but he’s very silly. He’s an anthropomorphic biscuit, and his tongue is made of butter. He’s very happy. So, I would get some Montgomery Biscuits gear. If you’re a Simpsons fan, there’s the Albuquerque Isotopes, who named themselves after the Simpsons episode where the Isotopes were gonna move to Albuquerque, and they have a very 1950’s atomic era logo that’s cool.
Kurt Elster: It is a lot of fun, and actually, like walking around with you, many times people have, like just total strangers have been like, “I love that shirt.” When you’re wearing your MILB stuff.
Paul Reda: Yes, it’s cool. I think it’s getting a little too far now maybe, like all team names are weird, and when all team names are weird, like none of them are weird.
Kurt Elster: Well, it’s niching down. You pick the one that speaks to your sense of humor, or you’re a Simpsons fan, so you do the Isotopes. Or you think the Biscuits are funny, which they are, so you get that. Or like the Hops, because you’re into beer. I think it’s more just like that hyper personalization that we see a lot of DTC brands doing now.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it’s like there’s the Rocket City Trash Pandas, and it’s like a raccoon, and it’s also in a garbage can rocket ship, and I’m sort of like, “All right-“
Kurt Elster: I will never not laugh at referring to a raccoon as a trash panda. I think that’s brilliant.
Paul Reda: See, to me, I’m just like, “All right, we’ve gone too far.” Something’s gotta be nice.
Kurt Elster: Well, that’s what the official gear is for. All right. We’ll wrap it up there, Mr. Reda. I, dear listener, would love to hear your thoughts on this episode, so please join our Facebook group. Search The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders on Facebook and come talk to us. Other than that, I hope you stay safe and are having a great summer.
Paul Reda: Farewell.