Breaking Down 4 Shopify Stores

Today we are going to go and dissect 4 Shopify stores that we just did some research earlier and found and we thought, hey, maybe this will be a good blog.. 

Before we get into this, I just want to say welcome if you're new to this channel. My name is Christian Pinon, one of the co-founders here at Branding. We've been helping frustrated store owners since 2015 become impactful store owners through tutorials, tactics, strategies and more. If you want to support our YouTube Channel, make sure to hit that subscribe button and turn on notifications. It helps us out a lot, and it's great for our channel, it’s great for you and the community. 

Store 1- Pinklily.com

All right, let's get started. So store number one, it's going to be Pinklily.com. 

We found this store a while back, but we just kind of looked at it for any clothing brand, maybe boutique type style. They're doing really, really well. 

Let’s go over to the homepage. There were a couple of things that we saw right away that we liked. One thing that you see is that the cursor is the little hand button. 

So that means that the whole banner is an image that's a huge plus. Even though they have a little button that says  Shop Now, the whole thing is a link. You should be doing this for your store as well. That's number one best practice. That's something that they're doing really, really well here. 

Next up, below the heading, they are featuring a few collections. You should probably also do something like that.

They have a Shop Bestsellers, which is great. 

Now, something that we do see that they're doing really well is that they don't have any sold out products. So whenever you do Shop Bestsellers, you run into the problem that some people might get a lot out of stock or sold out products. So if you do a best seller collection on your homepage, just make sure that you don't have any sold out products and that all the products that show here are just nice, good and available for the public shop. 

They have a Graphic T-Shirt collection, that's pretty good. So they have two collections where you can actually look at actual products in there and you can also scroll through. That is a huge plus. 

They have a testimonials section called Love From Our Customers. 

This is huge. If you don't have any sort of testimonials or anything like that, make sure you start getting some testimonials. 

They may have it on a per product basis, but because they're a boutique store they have products coming in and going out rather quickly. So it might not make sense to do a per product review or testimonial. So something like this will be very, very beneficial for you. You have real people who are purchasing their products to have just a few testimonials. If they could have more or maybe a scrolling section for the testimonials, that would be even better. If they have videos, that could also be really, really good. 

Now, this is good because they have this next section coming up. This next section is kind of genius. It's shop #PinkLilyStyle. 

So this is from their Instagram. People on Instagram are actually buying from the store and they're using the hashtag and they're able to capitalize on that and showcase a feed of images from people who are using their product. 

They can also do shop the look. So whatever you see in that picture on Instagram, you can actually shop that look.

Now a tip that we would like to share here and show you guys, because we do this a lot whenever we see something that we like. If you want to find out exactly how they're doing this, you can right click on the page and then click Inspect. 

Then what you want to do is you scroll up and you can kind of already see, OK, here we go foursixty.com. 

So a lot of times these are external apps that they're adding into the store and something like foursixty is a little bit pricier. As you can see on their homepage, it’s user generated content for Instagram made shoppable. 

This is not an ad for foursixty, we’re just showing you how Pink Lily has that feature. Let’s just take a look at pricing real quick, and as you can see, it can be pricey. $50 per month up to $500 a month. You have to be doing crazy amounts of money on your Shopify store to get to the full suite of features that they have. 

But it just works and it's really nice. This is a little neat trick: hit, inspect and within the code you should be able to see something that looks like foursixty  on the website. So check it out. So, again, that's pretty genius. 

We really like the site. It's pretty clean. The font that they're using is also pretty clean. Typically when you see boutiques, they may use cursive crazy fonts, sometimes it could be hard to read. So keeping it clean like this is good. Using some of those cursive fonts on the header might be a good idea if you like to do it there. 

There is something else that we saw in the corner, Pink Perks, it looks like they’re using one of the apps to do referrals or VIP and points and things like that. An app like this is amazing for returning customers. 

We just love everything about this. It’s all on brand with images that they've taken.

Bulletproof Coffee

Next up we have Bulletproof Coffee. 

There are a couple of things that we like here. They have a call to action, again, going all over the header. Everything is clickable on the header. You want to do that.  Looks like they were featured on CNN, Vogue, Rolling Stone, etc. That's good social proof. If you are featured in anything remotely close to any of this, you definitely want to showcase that. So social proof and testimonials and user generated content are all things that just make you more legit, make you that more experienced store so these are things that you definitely want to add if you have them. 

Now we have some products here and when you hover over them, something changes. That's good. 

And some blocks with more products. Looks like they have a blog post, maybe part of their strategy is to educate. 

They do have a learn tab. 

They also have what is called a mega menu. 

As you can see, whenever you hover over some of these on the navigation, you have what's called Mega Menu because it's just huge. It takes over half of your screen and has a lot of different links, a lot of different things. They've broken down their shopping area, coffee, MCT oil, proteins, like that's really good. You can Shop All Products, that's also really good. 

They even have a little ad or a little promotion where if you subscribe you can save 10 percent. That's perfect. 

We’re going to go back to the education. They have a whole tab on Learn with recipes and health upgrades. It looks like they are going through that strategy of educating. So it makes sense that on their homepage they're actually showcasing their blog and some of the products and how to do the recipes. So just a little mix of everything that they're offering. It's not just coffee, it's more than just coffee. 

Again, social proof as seen on The New York Times. 

Customer favorites. OK, this is a little bit different from bestsellers. These are the ones that probably have the most reviews you can see here, four thousand five hundred reviews. You can definitely see why these are customer favorites. These are really nice, nice bright buttons. 

Available at. 

So if you have your products available at different stores or people want to actually see them in person, include this section. This might be some custom work, they’re a little bit bigger brand. 

Now this is important too, they have a subscribe today. Always try to find a way to get people's email addresses. So even if they don't shop today, then make it somehow where they still give you an email address and you can nurture them that way. 

Something that I would maybe do a little bit more here is try to give them something, some sort of lead magnet. Basically, it could be a PDF, could be a video educational series where you're giving them something for free in order to get that email address. 

We actually like this footer. They don't have every single link that they have in the top navigation. I believe they're using maybe some of the most important links. It just gives you a nice little breakdown of these are our main categories or maybe more popular pages. But here at the top, you can see the mega menu just has a lot more to offer than the footer. But that's excellent. I love that a lot. 

Something that we saw earlier under Health Upgrades is Sleep Hacks. Let's just check out this guide. 

This is so cool because they're teaching you how to sleep, but they're making coffee, which does a complete opposite. That's more power to them. 

Something we did like a lot was the images. So we typically tell people not to use stock photos, but they're using kind of like the stock photo images, but they're doing a little twist to it. They're adding and inserting a little bit of their branding in there. And then they're doing something really cool, like this image, the hexagon. This hexagon shape is going through this guy like some some parts are behind him, some parts are in front of him. 

So it's just like a cool little thing that just adds to the website, adds to the credibility. It's not just a stock photo that you're using. It's actually a blended stock, they’ve actually made it their own right by adding this little piece of branding to it. So if you're using stock photos on any of your stuff, do something like that. It looks clean. It was good. It looks on brand, it matches the font color, matches the buttons.

Kylie Cosmetics

Next up is Kylie Cosmetics. You know Kylie Jenner, huge reality TV star. She has this amazing brand, Kylie Cosmetics, but apparently, something changed recently. So they have the splash page and it says that something is coming. Periods on each of these words which would make each of these words separate sentences, which is interesting. 

So her website is down. Even though the website is down, they're probably doing some maintenance or maybe revamping the whole thing or getting rid of all the products, putting new products in or something like that. But they're still giving them the ability to stay in contact with them. So just as we saw the subscribe button on the Bulletproof Coffee website, they have something that's coming. So now we’re curious about what's coming. Stay in the know, sign up below. Wow. They even rhyme there, that's nice. We’re going to put our email address in here because they have piqued our interest in what’s to come. So now, we are going to get updates on Kylie Cosmetics. 

Nerd Wax

The next one is NerdWax. 

So something interesting that we saw on this one is they don't have a call to action, like how do you not have a call to action right from the get go? So you see at the top, Stop Slippy Specs And Sunny's. I know exactly what your product does, but we want to buy this and we can't buy it when we first land on your website. 

So that would be a huge fix that you would try to do here. And we've seen it on all the other pages. There's some sort of shop now or learn more or whatever, some sort of call to action, letting people know how to get to the next step. 

This is pretty cool, it’s kind of like Glaxo like you can put it on your glasses so they don't slip down your nose. 

Then in the next section, there still isn’t anything for someone to buy. 

It's not until the third section on the home page that you can actually add something to cart and the button is not even popping. So this is maybe not the best practice, but it would be something to take into consideration. 

They have a really good product description here. Like this has a lot of good information, it has features, it has ingredients. You asked for it, we've delivered. It seems like people are asking for certain things and they're giving the people what they want. 

They have As Seen On Shark Tank, that's important. Again, social proof, you definitely want to have those in there.

Then we have people actually posting these pictures with the reviews. This is a great section right here. If you have ever the opportunity to include pictures with your reviews. Absolutely. Do it. This helps the credibility and just authenticity of the website as a whole. That's perfect. 

They have some videos here. We haven't necessarily seen videos on any other websites that we've done. So top three FAQs and How To Apply Nerdwax. They're also giving you the opportunity to read the video if you don’t watch them. 

There's a couple of things missing here. You definitely want to have something to collect email addresses. There’s not enough call to actions to purchase the actual product. They're missing an opportunity there, especially right when people land on their homepage. It's going to be very important to be able to shop now and even having a video auto looping right here in the background of someone just applying it and then putting them on like it doesn't have to have any audio. It's just the mere fact of using the product on your glasses. You kind of get the idea, like I know what that is. I have an idea what that is. You need to have that call to action here.

Then the menu being a drawer. We wouldn't necessarily do that for our store, but if you have the traffic and the following and the esthetics of the website call for something like this, then you could do it, but we always try to, you know, maybe have a few menu items popped up right here. 

But overall, it is a very nice, esthetically pleasing store. Just a few things to fix as far as trying to get people to purchase a particular product 

That's all I have for today. If you would like to watch our “How To” video on this subject, you can watch it here, and make sure that you hit that like button. We're going to like that. If you like it, we like it, too. And we'll like you liking our video. Also, consider subscribing to our YouTube Channel. If you want more of those videos, let us know in the comments of the video. We’ll be more than happy to break down your Shopify store or if you have a Shopify store from someone else, that you think that they're doing really well but you don't know exactly what it is that they're doing? Let us know. We'll break it down in the next video and we'll do a part two. Maybe we’ll get to part 30. THat would be a dream, to just break down Shopify stores all day.