Hey, Scott Austin here. In this episode, I'm gonna review some Shopify stores.

So, as always, there's an accompanying video. If you listen to the audio version and you can watch the video if you want to see what I'm talking about on the screen.

Now, normally when I do an episode like this,

I do a Google search for something that's kind of relevant to what's going on.

And right now it's the middle of October. So a good search for me to do would be, hey, let's find some Halloween candy.

instead of going to search, I thought I'd start this a little bit differently today. And that is to go to ChatGPT.

So here I am in chat GPT five and

input I gave it was can you recommend five healthy snacks

that I can

give out on Halloween. Limit your results only to Shopify stores. So it's kind of nice because when I do this in search,

I can't have it just limited to Shopify stores, and I have to filter through

which ones are Shopify stores to show you in an episode.

So

already

AI, there's a little value add going on there,

and it gives me back some results

It says, and it's kind of interesting because the more I use AI, the more I learn about it and how it's doing certain things right.

So, you know, I did say that I can give out on Halloween.

So then it says, you know, in its response,

if you like, I can pull direct product links. It doesn't give that to me by default, which I don't know why it doesn't, but I didn't ask for it, so that's fine.

And then it says and it can filter for mini sizes ideal for trick or treaters.

Which is one of those, you know, I is trying to be smart about things and it realizes when you give things out at Halloween, you know, mini sizes are better. But once again, it didn't do that by default.

But it gave me a list of five.

Different snacks. You know, I did ask for healthy snacks.

So a lot of them are, like, healthy by the ingredients. And then a couple of them are high protein

for people who are trying to, you know, put on muscle. So

this chomps one that first shows up and then the,

Mars protein snacks, the fifth one,

they're very much towards you know, people who are trying to bulk up probably not appropriate for Halloween.

And the middle three are like trail mixes and nuts and berries and that kind of stuff.

None of them say Halloween.

In them specifically. And I is trying to because it actually says in the eye result why it's good for Halloween.

But, you know, I was surprised that none of them said Halloween or their Halloween version or Halloween, you know, bulk pack or snack packs or something like that.

Which, you know, do exist on the internet,

even exist in one of the stores, I think, when we go to it later on.

But, you know,

I right now is, you know, trying to look at the structured data inside of, you know, Shopify stores and all stores, for that matter.

And the structured data in Shopify stores probably don't specify Halloween and different holidays

for these healthy snacks.

And you know, what we're going to be seeing in the future is,

you know, Shopify stores and all e-commerce stores are going to be doing a lot more

structured data behind their products, and you'll see a lot more from us at Puma about that, because we're actually building an app for that purpose in the future

we want to put in the Shopify App Store, because that structured data

is going to be so important.

But right now, the. Net point of what I'm saying is none of these products were specific for Halloween,

based on the product data.

It was I determining they were appropriate for Halloween based on

what it assumes is appropriate for Halloween.

So then, you know, after giving those five results and I read through it, I said, okay, let's follow your advice.

This is me talking back to I

limit your recommendations to products that would be suitable for trick or treating. So individually wrapped

and then went through a whole bunch of work and give me a nice little summary table, like, you know, the way it

consolidates a whole bunch of information really quickly is just,

amazing.

And then, you know, at the end it says, if you like, I can pull, you know, ten more snack specific Shopify options

with direct links and unit cost and filter by price, less than $0.50 per treat.

So you can budget per trick or treat or would you like that?

that's amazing. It's it's a great idea. Yes, please. It was my response.

So then it gave me,

ten of them.

And then it said, here's my top three picks for you.

And the ten of them were, I'm looking here.

or 5 of them are from one,

provider. And then the rest of them are

different brands.

And then I said, all right, you know, I like your top three, provide links to your top three picks.

And it gave me

three,

products. And these are the three we're going to go through. So when I look at these three products

and we're going to look at their brand beyond that.

So this was probably 1 or 2 minute exercise

on,

ChatGPT

and trying to do some

trick or treat shopping

you know, in preparation for Halloween and wanted to focus on healthy snacks.

So let's see what I came up with as the results. And then let's look at those brands and those products. Right. Just, this is just a way for me to bring up three random stores

for me to review for you, so you can see how I look at stores

and evaluate them

and evaluate their shopping experience and their overall, you know, brand.

So the first one is, Earth. And

today's video for those watching on video, we're going to be looking at the mobile version of the product page. The rest of the store look at desktop because you can see more things on the screen at once.

But as you all know,

everybody's shopping on mobile these days. So I want to look at the product page at least on mobile, so we can evaluate it, you know, on that smaller screen

in Yammer it has, you know, some nice branding.

I like the colors,

the green and the blue or, you know, green tea or whatever we call those colors. Those go together nicely.

The

colors do look a little different on their packaging

from their website. So, you know, they might want to check that

and make them a little more consistent. But, the colors, you know, make the branding, you know, friendly and warm.

That said, you know, the first, you know, criticism I have is

they've got this Halloween stock up sale. It sounds like a great idea, right.

But they've got this element at the top of the page in the announcement bar. That is absolutely ridiculous,

There is one, two, three, four, five lines of text

in the announcement bar on mobile with 1 to

three different discount codes that I have to type in manually.

I guess based on what price tier I'm at. And it's $65, $70 and $75 are the price point. So they're $5 apart.

And that gives me another 5% off. So if I order $65, I get 10% off

$70. I get 15% off

$75, 20% off the fact that I have to type those codes in manually.

Unacceptable in today's world.

Right. You can do that with automatic discount codes. Super easy.

And then

the fact that

for $10 more from 65 to 75, I get twice the discount.

That's just not good pricing strategy.

And then there's also a promotion. And this is enjoy free shipping on all orders over $49. So I got

four different price points I have to keep in my mind.

Because they're not

taking care of that for me.

not good.

Now let's look at this product. It's,

fruit snacks and it is a bulk thing. So they would be good for trick or treating.

an organic fruit snacks variety box.

And my first image is of the packaging.

My second image is, the packaging and tells me that I get to, 20 snack packs per box

and it shows little snack packs.

The third one is talking about the flavors and a couple, product badges for elements like,

organic and no artificial dyes.

The next image is

a

side by side comparison of their product

with what they called the other guys, without specifying a brand.

And there's 1 to 5 different criteria being judged,

and they get checks for all of them,

and the competitor gets XS for all of them.

And that's just to me is deceitful or,

don't know the right way to say it, dishonest or B.S. probably the best way to say it when when you are good on everything and the competition is bad on everything,

you've self-selected what you're judging on, right? Because

your competition is not bad on everything,

So you should be a little more fair in this and your evaluations.

Totally fine that you have more checks, but you know, your competition should have checks also. Right? And the other guys, you know,

if you're a healthy snack brand,

because this is a, you know, their title is organic fruit snacks and a GM Earth. So I think, you know, they're going after healthy snacks in general. We'll see if I'm wrong in that as we delve deeper into the brand.

But

if you're a healthy snack brand, you should. I'm looking at it and like the other guys, is probably the unhealthy snack brands where they should be comparing themselves

to other healthy snack brands and

put a stake in the ground.

put some brand names down there that people can identify.

Next product image is once again the packaging with a kid holding it like they're taking it to school in their backpack.

Next product image is a bunch of products deals on things that this product doesn't have because it's egg free, gluten free and those kind of things. Next product image is selling other candy.

I would not recommend that people are on this product. Let's focus on this product.

The next image is

the

backside of the packaging which shows nutrition facts.

But this is a render and it's at an angle. So it's actually, you know, hard to read,

where I would just show the nutrition panel stand alone without the rest of the back of the packaging.

So in all of this,

I do not see a photo of the product.

they look like little gummies. I can tell that by some of the pictures they've drawn,

but there's no.

And there's one thing that's maybe a photo of their stuff, but it's really small on the overall photo where everything else is computer graphics, so they don't even show like a closeup of what this, you know, candy looks like. So you get a sense for,

know, the feel of the product or the look of the product.

Looking at the product title Organic Fruit snacks variety box, they have seven reviews, so it's a good thing they've got reviews. Now they're showing two product options here. One is sizes 20 count and the other is pack count. One box.

That is kind of weird okay, so the pack count is basically the same thing as a quantity box.

They show a quantity box. I can order more than one if I want to. Now the reason I would put a pack count in as a product option is, you know, if you order three and we're going to give you a 10% discount on that, some sort of like quantity Briggs type thing,

you know, pack package count is a good way to do that because you can easily just price that very a price at a 10% discount if they order the three pack versus the one,

they're not doing that here.

Right. So both their product options

have one choice and they're selected by default. So these product options don't add any value to the process. So I would remove them. Now the reason they might have them is maybe you know they've got a 40 count box also. And it's out of stock. And they're not shown out of stock ones.

If that's the case fine. But it was not the case. Let's just get rid of that, you know, extra element on the page that just can confuse people.

They've got a little bit of a

copy on

these in the product.

Not much there, but a little bit of something.

They talk about their simple ingredients. They talk about their ingredients.

Once again, they don't have the nutrition panel an easy way to see. And then they talk about the free from and

Friendly facts,

and then flavors may includes into the flavors of the elements. So that's not bad.

They do something interesting here. I've seen it a couple times in this page with capitalization.

Right. So I'm a big fan of your branding, consistency

and consistency in everything that you're doing, like colors, your fonts, your capitalization, your imagery and all that kind of stuff.

So here,

most of this,

what they're doing, like, they, you know, they have this title case, you know, like organic fruit snacks, variety box, the product title,

the first

letter, it every word is capitalized.

And then, you know, when you're doing a product description, you know the sentence starts with the capital letter.

But then when I get to simple ingredients, it's all small case letters.

So it's harder to differentiate between them. And they're also comma separated instead of in a bullet point list. So it's it's harder to read them, but it just to me it doesn't look consistent

to have title case going on, then sentence case and then all small letters and they do that. I think it was in the footer also.

Yeah, in the footer. They've got, a bunch of links in the footer and everything in the footer is small case, but that's you know, they don't do that everywhere because like in the breadcrumbs it is title case. So there's an inconsistency there in the branding. Not the worst thing in the world right. A lot of their branding is very consistent, especially on the color side of thing.

And even the fonts,

look more consistent. But that was what I noticed was

capitalization

threw me off.

Now you're using the output for the reviews. I've got seven reviews for this product.

You know, they've got the ability to write a review on this product page, which I don't recommend doing.

 

Because I have you on here right now not having purchased a product and write a reviews.

You can disable that in the app.

They've got the tabs for reviews. There's probably another one for questions or something, but there's no questions on this product.

But

it shows reviews tab. So just another element that's not needed.

They have the ability to filter reviews. This product has seven reviews. Probably no need to have filters.

When you start getting in, you know, dozens and hundreds of reviews, then you can turn on filters.

But even then it's really not that necessary.

Now they've also got a, you may also like section recommended products

down at the bottom of the page.

If you listen to me talk more than three minutes, you realize I'm not a fan of that on product pages

most of the time.

Now, the interesting thing is, and and I was thinking about this when I saw this element when I first started reviewing this pages.

My thinking on that might change over time

in that,

with this ChatGPT search that I did.

What it did is it recommended products to me where if I had done a normal Google search, it would probably recommend collections to me.

we might in in a world where more AI search is happening than, you know, or increasing AI search and decreasing web search, people might be landing more on our product pages in the future than they are today.

Where, you know, most SEO is driven to

the,

collections. Therefore making merchandizing on the product page other products more applicable. I don't think we're there yet, but it made me think that

maybe that's a shift we'll see happening.

An interesting thing is

they actually have

Halloween organic gummy fruits. The product title is

Halloween Organic Gummy Fruits. And once again, as we talked about, they're

inconsistent capitalization.

That product is for products shown on the page.

Three of them are total case,

but the Halloween Organic Gummies is,

small letters only.

But you know, just know that I did not pick up on the fact when it recommended products for me. The one with Halloween in the title.

And then they've got in the footer, they've got the, social links to get the pay icons,

and then they have a

ton of links,

a ton of them.

They get what I consider the normal

links in the footer, you know, things about the company and policies and support and all that good stuff.

But then they've got this,

element where they're trying to merchandise everything they sell. So it's sort of like their top nav but expanded.

And to me, that's just a that's on every single page, right on, on their website.

So their, their footer

is

not half their page. And you see it starts right

here.

So if we look at the scroll bar over here

yeah. Their footer is like one third of their total page height on mobile.

Now there's some things they could do to make it, take up less space on mobile and make things a little more horizontal and stuff that they're not doing.

But I wouldn't have

all all the shopping links repeated down in the footer.

So now

let's look at the rest of this store

in,

desktop mode so we can see more on the screen at one time and evaluate their, their brand a little bit more,

even on desktop mode, that, that announcement bar message is just way too long. And confusing.

But let's go to their home page and their merchandizing Halloween right on their home page, which is good and timely.

They've got a lot of,

product badges that have their own

cartoony, like, you know, consistent look and feel. Right? So that's part of their, their branding elements.

That looks very nice having those all be consistent. I had noticed elsewhere,

the product badges that are on the,

packaging

aren't consistent, but that's because they're using industry standard product badges.

And each one has their own, you know, design element behind them,

which I like, just overriding those and putting in your brand specific ones.

Then they merchandise, you know,

two of their they're doing a lot of product merchandizing on their homepage, which I'm not a fan of.

I think you need to drive people down to your navigation a little bit better.

What I want to see here is

on this home page,

I'm just going to list on image is product product product product product product product products, those product photos that I'm seeing.

And then I finally see,

a person, a young girl smiling, you know, on some treats and she's made,

and then product,

product.

even in their Instagram feed. It's a lot of product photos and not many lifestyle photos, but there are two lifestyles. They're very kid focused in their photography, which seems appropriate.

So

there's not a lot of people in this photography,

and that, you know, you know, most small brands that are starting out, they don't have that lifestyle photography yet.

They start off with product photography. But you do want to,

you know, migrate that, especially your your homepage where you're setting the brand tone

and your navigational elements.

You want to move that into lifestyle imagery over time. And they're doing a good job with the ones that I've got with, you know, the kids in them kind of thing.

Just want to see now, if we go to their about page, I want to read about them.

So they have a menu called company.

And there is no about in that menu.

You have other ones.

No. About that I can see. Let's see if I hit the contact us. Nothing there. Let's see if they put it in the header.

Nope.

They don't have an about us that I can see. All right. So let's look at their contact us.

Their contact us is purely a Zendesk form.

That's not very good because normally to contact us you can really say, hey, we're in, you know, the United States or where in you in Germany, wherever you are. So you can feel

there. If I look at their FAQ, you.

They don't open up with an FAQ. I've got to select what I want.

Nothing there on the about us side of things. Once again, that's all done inside of Zendesk.

They've also got a rewards program there. In my mind. Too many links in the header that are not shopping focused, right? FAQ and contact us are not about shopping.

And you know, those are things that should happen only when you fail,

When you as the customer fail on the shopping experience and

having those in the header, it makes me think that maybe we will fail their shopping experience more than I thought they would.

They've got a loyalty program.

It makes sense for a consumer like them to have a loyalty program.

Once again, I don't think I would make that a top level nav element.

You know, your goal to start off with is getting, you know, customers to buy through a brand. Once they're buying from your brand, you can then promote the rewards

program,

and you can do that inside of email to your existing customers instead of to everybody,

and your top level nav, they've got a store locator, which is a really good thing

if they're on,

and a whole bunch of retail locations.

And here I am in San Diego,

within just a couple blocks of my house, there's five places that I can buy their products from. So that's fabulous

that it just came right up, you know, detected

my location all that really accurately.

That's nicely done.

They've got this free from which I think is a, you know, in their header navs.

It's free from and you know, when I first saw that, I was like, oh free product. What am I getting for free? And it's their it's their way of saying our products don't have all these bad things for you.

Which makes sense. But I was just confused by it. Oh, and then on the free from they have a little our company thing.

Yum Earth was created by families for families and offers a variety of organic, allergy free, friendly sweets.

As more people are affected by food allergies every day, our promise is to keep innovating and creating friendly switch. But that's all it says, right? It doesn't

show these look like stock photos to me.

they're not because it has their products in them.

Or

it could be I inserted products or, you know, Photoshop inserted products. I'm not sure they feel very stock to me.

and they have a I hate mission statements on small brands. I really do.

They have that. But this is all in the free from right

where I thought this is gonna be about their products.

They're they're trying to tell their whole about story on that,

but it's not that deep. I get no sense for who these people are, where they're located. Do we have things in common kind of stuff?

And I'm beginning to think that this is actually a photo shoot they did, because these two people here are the same in this other photo.

So they actually did a photo shoot,

which is good,

but I don't know if those are, you know, models or the actual, you know, team members or brand owner kind of stuff where,

you know, if you're talking about the brand, you want to be clear that, hey, here's who we are. You know, me, John, and all that kind of stuff.

know, and that said, I'm being really nitpicky here. Yo, Earth is is a nice, nice store. It looks really nice.

biggest change I would make is flatten out their, their top level. Now have

to be,

more shopping focused

and to be more consistent in their capitalization.

And, and tell their brand story better.

in all, nice looking store. Let's actually,

take

candy, drop it into our cart,

see what their cart looks like.

Oh, that was really weird. There was a

a loading gif to have the cart thing show up,

it's a fly out one.

They got a free shipping counter on their order on their cart.

I'm not a fan of those of you having qualified for free shipping.

Because, you know, some studies have been done that just say people look at that and like, well, I'm not getting free shipping, then forget it. They don't go back and order more.

They just abandon this this order. I do like showing it when they earn free shipping.

But not if they haven't,

earned free shipping.

And then if I go to the checkout, I just want to see what their branding looks like there, because their branding so strong and the on their site.

And it is also,

looking good here. Let's see if. Yeah, they've got their colors here inside of the checkout experience.

I might take the gray background on the right hand side and make that their green on a really light shade of it. From that it's totally fine.

So that is Earth.

Overall, I like the store a lot.

You've been like, I criticize

heck out of it.

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All right, let's go on to our next store, which is very good.

The product that got recommended is they're very good.

120 pack, 1.5oz mini snack bags.

So once again, no snack bags. Makes sense for Halloween treats. Now, the first thing I noticed on this store was

they don't have a fave icon for their store, so their tab in my Google Chrome browser

is the default one because they didn't put that branding element in their store.

Now,

what I like about the product photo that I first see, it shows one of the little individually packed,

bags, you know, snacks, which they look like trail mix kind of thing.

And they have a little,

element

put on it.

like a little badge. It's a 120 pack.

So they show one pack,

right?

Because that's what you buy as a pack and. But it shows that there's a count of 120 when you buy it. I think it's nicely done.

remember what the other brand had done

was they showed the full package.

Here they're showing the individual packages and just giving you a count. So I like that

the second image is the same one without the, 120 count on it.

And the third one is a photo of,

the product in close up. I like that a lot.

And they've got, you know,

text with little, little hand-drawn arrows saying walnuts, almonds, pineapple, cherry. So they're basically telling you the ingredients and letting you see what they look like.

You know, if you had a handful of this,

stuff in your hand.

So that's nicely done.

They've got share icons on their product page, which I don't think anybody's used those. This 2009 wide themes even include them anymore. I have no idea.

They allow you to,

purchase and subscribe. If you subscribe, you save 10%. So they've got the promo for that.

they've got the recharge. How subscriptions work.

The recharge puts that on there.

There's a button,

but they've styled the CSS to not show the button in the text,

but it's showing the icon

of a circle with an arrow. It just looks like a refresh button for some reason.

when you click on it, then you see the button for a second

and it pops up the how subscriptions work.

So it looks like they were trying to hide that element

and didn't finish hiding it. All

poorly done.

Their quantity box doesn't have plus or minus or up and down arrows to change the quantity.

I have to select the number and then change it.

With my keyboard

they've got a short,

product description.

It is very short.

four lines. As the name implies, it's full of berry goodness. Very good. Includes pineapple, golden raisins, blueberries, cranberries, walnut pieces, almonds, and cherries.

A mini version of our snack bags for single serve snacking.

I would imagine if I went to the snack bag, there'd be a lot more information. That is all that is on this page,

So the three images I saw, oh, there's a fourth image which is the Nutrition Facts panel.

So that's good that that's there

can see the details of that stuff. But not a lot of information on this page. There are no reviews.

No social proof of any kind.

So it's a nice, simple,

clean,

page

because there's so little on it.

I would expect a little more detail here

when I'm,

you know, and by the way, the price of this 120 pack is $127,

So I spent $127, and I just have that four lines of text that I read to you to explain to me what I'm buying.

And maybe their customers know their brand already and that kind of stuff, or know the products

well enough.

But this product page,

should have the same information that's on the other product page. So let's see that. Let's go and look

and see if I'm right, that the

main product page for Very Good

has,

more information.

Now I'm trying to find that in their name. I'm going to guess it's a snack mix.

hard to figure that out

because the way this is laid out, it's really hard to see the names of the products

I'm not going to explain how poorly that page is done.

Let's just search

for

very good and see if we can find,

the other version of it.

Now they've only got a, 24 pack. Also,

and it's got the same lack of information. So I was wrong that they probably had more information on the other product they were referencing.

So let's look at overall at the Truly Good Foods brand and see what we can evaluate here. We're looking at it, you know, in full screen mode.

Now

announcement bars is flat rate shipping of 6.99. Free shipping over $100.

I don't understand why flat rate shipping is a value prop. If customers find that as a positive, I would be surprised.

They've also got a whole bunch of colons or something in the middle. I don't know what's going on there, just

confuses thing in my mind.

They've got this homepage image.

Big banner shows a lot of product photos.

Not the worst thing in the planet.

got text that says are above it

or overlaid.

Who could say no to

truly good

And and I had this pause for a second as I said that because they've got a shot now button over the text.

So where it says who who could say no to all right, the shop now. But I'm like, what does it say there. You know, I don't you know, it took me a second to realize what it was saying. So it just, you know,

that they laid that out poorly where the text is embedded in the, image,

but they didn't think that there was going to be a button over the top of that.

So,

easy thing to fix. But if one of those those little nitpicky points now their main nav is all about their products. So I like that,

scrolling down,

their homepage, they go straight from

the who could say no to truly good

to individual products. Then individual subscriptions and individual packaged snacks.

And then at the bottom they've got, you know, a couple nav links for shop candy, shop nuts and seeds

and then the I want to buy my favorite snack.

Well, that sounds interesting. What's my favorite snack? I click on that

and it's a contact.

don't see a product you are interested in purchasing it. Truly good

food scam.

Fill out the form below with more information about

products you like added to our online store.

There is no form here,

right? So

that's a complete fail

and I wouldn't have them.

Once again. Yeah, you hear me say this and I don't. If I'm clear enough when I say this.

Too many sites are designing themselves for when they fail, right? Going back to,

the previous store I was mentioning in the header,

they had the FAQ and the contact us. Those are failure links,

I'm only going to use those when the store doesn't work for me

here on their home page

at the bottom center.

They've got an element designed for when they fail.

So

I don't like having that stuff front and center. I like to allow people to keep shopping and not get confused by these things, especially one like this.

That is a dead end. So

in this home page, going back to, you know, reviewing the home page and the brand, there's not a single human person in the photography.

I'm just going to pick on another,

product.

No humans. There's no humans in the store at all. I also don't see reviews in the footer. If there's a reviews link, there is not.

So there's no social proof either that I can see.

Now if I go into the about page,

there about us is one, two, three, 4 or 5 six lines.

really good foods is a food manufacturer, importer and distributor of bulk and packaged snacks and specialty foods.

For over 40 years we have been responsive to our food industry customer needs. Oh my God, that is awful.

Awful

wording

like would you ever talk to a human that way?

And we continue to help them grow their business by sharing our product and market expertise.

Our company was founded in 1977

and we are women owned, family operated.

They forgot the and

our goal is to produce the tastiest snacks for families to share for generations by starting with the highest quality ingredients

and create snack mixes bursting with the bold flavors you love.

I have seen some poor about pages. This is on that list.

There's no field photos, right? And they say a couple good things that where women owned family operated since 1977.

Fabulous. Show it to me, show me, show me your first warehouse or your first manufacturing facility. In 1977.

Show me that family photo. Right.

Show me. You know, since 1970. So it's multiple generations, I bet, you know, working at this place.

I would love to see that story. And then I didn't even talk about where they're located. Right. Let's actually see in their contact Us page if they have,

no, they don't even have on their contact page where they're located.

Let's see if we can find that out in our online shopper policies.

Their email address is a different domain.

I don't trust that.

And they don't list their location there either. So I have no idea

who this family friendly, women owned. Family owned business since 1977. Why should I trust them? Right. They say things,

but they don't give me any proof of it.

So this store is really empty, right? It has no soul.

Well, you know the branding.

They got a color scheme. It's not bad.

There's, you know, some lack of consistency in certain things. And I'm not going to go into because

they need, you know, social proof, they need reviews.

They need,

a good story. Sounds like they have one, but they're not telling it to us in any sort of depth or with any proof

they need to establish, you know, where they're from, you know, all that stuff.

add humans into their photography and not just have a product photo in their own product photos or product renderings. Right.

easy things for them to fix in the store.

So let's move on from that to,

Ellis Flats.

The product that, got ranked was everything snack pack, a 20 pack.

It starts off weird. So this is a sunflower seed cracker. I can see that by looking in the product image.

There is only one product image. It looks like

I can subscribe to this.

It's got the right text for the recharge element showing up.

It's got the shop promo. I'm not a fan of shop promos. It drives me nuts the way that Shopify embeds that into your product page

automatically.

And you there's no way to turn it off with like a check box and your theme settings. We actually go in and put in some

CSS and JavaScript to remove that from our stores.

And then they've got the quantity button, the add to cart. Now this one has a really long,

product description. Really long.

I don't mean to in a too long away, but there's a lot of copy here, so that's good, right?

They're thinking about their products.

Now, I will say that,

there's only one product photo at the top and that it's it's I don't even know if it's packaging.

It's hard to tell if that's it because the flat lay. So I don't know if that's an image or, you know, a photo of the package.

Oh, I could see a net weight thing. So that is the packaging. But that wasn't obvious by me looking at it.

And then

I'm scrolling

on the product page

there. They're showing other products.

Oh, and see, this is what their packaging looks like. So this is just a cropping of the packaging. That's not good.

What I so the next time I see a photo of what I think this product is, is over two thirds of the way down the page.

So I went down this,

one,

product copy.

They had the merchandizing for other products. You know, I'm not a fan of that.

They showed product details, which is more text

ingredients, more text structured. Well, unlike some of the other ones we've seen shipping policy. And then below that I finally see an image

of the is these look like crackers made from seeds.

And the crackers have all this food put on top of them. So it's actually hard to see the cracker. Right? So then they've got another one, the cracker with even more food put on it. I don't see a photo of just the cracker on the whole product page. So yeah, it's low hanging fruit for them to,

fix.

But it looks like they're doing a good job talking about their products.

They do have product reviews on this page.

This is judge Me product reviews.

They've got a little bit of an issue with the margins on mobile.

They should fix that.

the,

text and images go all the way to the edges just on the the,

the judge be part of it.

And then their,

footer links are really short and simple,

but they could also make those horizontal and mobile or take up less space.

I also like to make my footer a different color. Yeah, usually I like the product page to be a white background and then the footer to be a, really light brand color or a dark wrinkle if we want to.

There's obvious where your product page ends and your footer begins.

But this is a nice looking page. The, the biggest criticism I have is the lack of imagery of the product.

So let's go to

the home page here

and see what we think about the overall brand. Now I am

immediately when I went to the homepage. You hate their header.

They've got a centered, logo, which is fine, but to the left of the center logo, they've got their nav menu and to the right they've got nothing. So it's very unbalanced.

I say, hey, that's just me personally because I'm a huge fan of symmetry. Right. And this is a very asymmetrical layout.

But let's look at Les Flats homepage now, this is not done well either.

Or they've got this, they got a nice image superfood seed crackers. Right. So they're trying to say this is what we sell. I like that a lot.

Enjoy. Live flats instead of bread or as a snack on their own. I like that.

And it got this image.

I can kind of tell the crack it's a really busy one, but not so bad.

What I don't like about it is the contrast issues. So

that Nav menu I talked about shows up in white text on this. It's overlaid, you know, the image is under laid underneath the header.

And the white text has places where it's easy to read because the contrast is good, and then places where it's not easy to read because the contrast is not good.

And then the L.A flats logo, they chose that to be a black logo instead of a white logo like the white text.

And the contrast is not good at all. So the Elios flats doesn't pop

when you come to their homepage

they're using white on the header on everything except for the logo for some reason,

they have some good value prop messaging on this.

Then they drive right into products, and I'm not a fan of merchandizing products on the homepage, but,

they've got this big banner, which is the best photo I've seen of their cracker so far. They should be showing this, a lot more places.

And it says light and crunchy, and it is a full page image

and it does nothing.

There's no links, and it just says light and crunchy.

So nice photo. But, you know, does it take me somewhere? Does it do something.

And then they've got,

good logos for brands.

Today goop, New York magazine.

But they're not clickable, so it'd be nice. You know, what I normally do in that case is

I'll link to a blog

article, but keep them on your site.

But in that blog article you'll see some screenshots. If it's a print thing

or, you know, embed some videos if it's an online thing

to show some proof that

you actually were shown on those brands that are in the logos,

and then get to know kids nutrition at its best. Read more I love that. Let's see what's behind the read more

talks about nutrition.

I like that a lot.

So really talk about the value prop of their products.

Not a lot of information there, but they do have some information there, so that's good.

Don't take our word for it. And then they have testimonials.

I don't know if those are driven. I don't I think the testimonials

are separate from the reviews.

I think if I remember correctly saw reviews, didn't we?

Yeah, we have reviews

in the store.

I'm on the product page again. The reviews are from Judge Me.

So they've got reviews and so they're not using Judge Me on the home page

to

show the reviews because Judge Me has a section you can put on the homepage for that.

And what I like about using the judge me on the homepage is so what they probably done here is they've picked some testimonials. If they like the best, which nothing wrong with that. And they put them on the homepage so they know exactly what's there. But there's no date on these.

So if you use the judge me carousel and show the date, what you know your customers will see is the three most recent five star reviews.

Because you can and judge me say only show five star reviews in the carousel on the homepage.

And they'll see the date of today or yesterday or two days ago so that, you know, show that there are recent reviews.

Now, if you don't have a lot of reviews and you're not getting many because you don't have any sales, then you don't want to show that because you don't want your most recent review to be from six months ago.

But if you have reviews coming in, you know, I would recommend putting the, you know, the judge me element on the homepage to show the date in those so people can see the recency. Not only had people bought these in the past, but they bought them recently in the past.

And then at the bottom here,

you know, our founder Ellen Love that we see a photo of the founder we love from our kitchen to yours,

and most flats is a woman owned, family operated company started by Ellen Max in 2017.

She's the health conscious mother of three with an appetite,

always on the lookout for recipes that taste great and make you feel great. Love that we get to read her story, so we click on that. I'm hoping I'm going to see Ellie's three kids here when I click on it.

I'm clicking on Read Our Story and it doesn't go anywhere.

So I was getting excited to learn about the brand owner. I want to see if there's a page. Yeah, there is a page. Just the link on the homepage wasn't working. The one on the nav is,

So yeah, total missed opportunity. Right. So Elle has been doing this since. Was it 2017 or was that one of the other brands?

Right.

If actually go back to the home page and see what it said.

Yeah. Since 2017. Okay.

So.

And it talks about she's a mom with kids. I don't see the I don't see the kids. Right.

So totally missing not an opportunity even build that brand even more. Right. You're putting a face and a name to the brand, which I love.

You're telling the right story, you know, health conscious mom,

but you're not proving that with photos of, you know, the kids and they're healthy and happy and, you know, hanging out with the family. Everybody's having a great time and all that kind of stuff.

And then, you know, they also talk about the process a little bit. Still

totally have for photography.

The people love the behind the scenes story.

did Ella start making these in her kitchen? Yeah, I would love from Art kitchen to yours.

So you know, you want to show a photo from 2017 or 2016 when she started making her own crackers because

nothing was good enough for her kids, right? Nothing out in the commercial world,

you know?

So show that photo of, you know, making them in the kitchen kind of thing and, and show show the evolution of the brand and all that good stuff.

In 2017 is now, you know, quite a few years ago, it's eight years ago. So

the fact you've been on now for eight years

gives you some street cred

to show that longevity and show how you've grown and improved since then.

And you know, I love the

so it's a woman owned business, you know, family run since 2017. Love those things. They're seeing it in words.

But you could also do some badges some trust badges with those things. You know, since 2017 a family owned business and that kind of stuff,

you know, blatant, promotion of my own app.

But we have badge zilla and all those badges are in that app, and you can throw them right in your home page and product page and all that good stuff

to reinforce those value props. You're seeing your text,

but do that in a visual way. Also, you want to do both,

Because different people consume information in different ways.

So you give the same information in multiple ways,

so different people can consume all your information.

on the rest of the homepage, there's a blog. I'm usually not a fan of blogs and the home page.

I see blogs as a way to drive traffic to your store,

not engage people on your store.

And also, you know, this is the exact opposite example of what I was talking about with judge me

the blog.

The most recent blog was March 16th, 2025. Today is October 19th, 2025,

and that's because the blogs are showing the dates, right?

after that it was December 17th, 2024,

and then September 4th, 2024. So they've created two new blogs in the past year.

So showing a dates there's a negative. Right? So I would hide those dates and I wouldn't show the blogs at all on the homepage.

you know, you may want to do that. That's fine.

And actually know these,

these blogs are not good. Right. Because the blogs are very,

press releases

now at rallies in North California. So that's a,

in store, right?

New packaging, same delicious taste. Big news. Ellsworth minis are here. So they're very PR focused, right?

About your brand and about your products. They're not customer focused in, you know, ten Healthy Recipes for your kids,

how to get your kids to eat better and all those kind of things.

If that was your blog content, maybe you could put on the homepage. I still wouldn't, but maybe you could.

This press releases stuff, I wouldn't do it.

But overall it looks like a fun brand.

Some some details missing,

but they really care about what they're doing, right? They're doing the better, you know,

product descriptions have more copy. They're showing themselves talking about the brand.

And a little bit of the story, just you know, keep working on that. And I think it's all good.

They're

all right. That is it for today's,

reviewing of some Shopify stores.

Hopefully this was insightful to you on how I look at stores and evaluate them so you can, you know, take that same idea to your store if you'd like, and think about, you know, ways you can improve your brand.

Thanks for listening.