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Hello, Scott Austin here. And in this episode, I'm going to do some story views. So recently my friends and I have been looking at electric skateboards and electric bicycles. So I've been spending a lot of time on websites, you know, just checking things out, doing research. And I noticed that a bunch of the sites naturally are on Shopify. So I thought I would look at some of the stores that I've been looking at and just do a review of them and, you know, give my feedback on how, how they're set up and recommendations that I would make on improving them. So the three stores that we're going to look at are one wheel, which is an electric skateboard. It's actually like the name says it's one big fat tire that you actually balance on. It's kind of cool technology. It's a very unique the next one is Evolve Skateboards. Evolve is really high-end electric skateboards. Most of them are longboards. They go really fast. They have a lot of battery power, so a lot of life to them. And the last one is an electric bike. And let me actually look up its name here. The name of the electric bike company is eco trick. So the reason I decided to do reviews of these different electric vehicle sites is because I actually found a really good example of good okay. And bad. Right. And the interesting thing about this is electric vehicles, whether it's the skateboards or the bicycles, you know, the average cart size of the average transaction value is really high, right? The bicycles are actually cheaper than the skateboards. The bicycles, the average price of a bike is anywhere between 1000 and $2,000. And on the skateboards, the average price is like 1200 to 2200.
So these are really high ticket items. They're also very unique items or newer items, right? It's not like people know a lot about them. So I think that these sites should do a really good job for the research side of things. You know, they should educate the customer quite a bit on what it is they're buying, what the differentiator is, what their choices are and that kind of stuff. So it seemed to me like a really good set of sites to look at, cause they should have, you know, good information on them. And they're high ticket price, which means they should invest in that information. So let's get started on the first one, which is one wheel and you know, right off the top on the one wheel homepage, they have an absolutely fantastic full with videos, streaming read the top of the page.
It's really high quality. It looks great. You know, it's, it's people having fun in different scenarios on the one wheel and you know, there's, they're on dirt paths, they're in a city environment, they're commuting, lots of smiling faces, you know, good lighting. It just really well done. The second you go there and you're like, alright, I know what this store is about. They sell this product that is going to be fun. And if I look at the rest of the homepage, you know what the one wheel site is doing, the next thing it does in the homepage is basically an in the one wheel. There's two different types of one wheels. And I know that that product name sounds kind of weird as I say it. So just know that is their product name one wheel, it's their brand and their product name. So they've got the pint and the XR, and there's some differences between them and they do a really good job.
The second element on the page is which one wheel is right for you. And for the pint, it says smiles for miles. Pocket-Sized awesome. So they're talking about its size and they talk about its range and speed. And then for the XR, they say big adventures, double the freedom, 12 to 18 mile range, 19 mile an hour at top speed. So really easily, they quickly explained to you the differences between your two big choices and they're helping you make that decision early on, which one of these is going to be right for you. I absolutely love that. I mean, you could, I could not recommend it a better way to do that. And then as you scroll down the rest of the page, you know, what you notice about one wheel is, you know, they've done a fabulous job creating their own photography, right? They just can't do stock photography because their products are very unique and they go out and they do lifestyle shoots.
It's not just product shoots on white backgrounds. They've got that also. So, you know, when you're picking a product, it's easy to see what that product is, but their site has a lot of rich imagery and they also do a really good job with community. So, you know, they've got community photos on their homepage and they've also got a community section in their footer, which if you click on, it will take you off to their forum. And they've got, it looks like 50, 60,000 different posts in that forum where they're allowing their community to get together and talk to one another. And I think that's absolutely fabulous now on the homepage, if I open it up in the Chrome console, and I look at the page weight, which I'm going to do right now, and I'm going to refresh my page so that I can see the most latest stats here, you know, the total page for all the content has on it is actually pretty light and performance pretty well.
Right now it just took me 3.7 seconds to download it. And there was a 4.1 Meg of assets transferred. So that's actually really good for a CA a page with so much content on it. You know, of course you could always be a little bit faster in that kind of stuff. But having that big full with video is going to take some, some bandwidth and they're running that video. It's an MP four video. So they're running it through HTML five video. And it streams pretty well. And their largest image size on that homepage is 208 kilobytes. So, you know, it's a little more than, I think it needs to be the next photo size down at 75 K. So they've just missed one image and optimizing it as well as they have the other images overall. Pretty good job. So then if we look at shopping experience, like I said, they have the two products that pint in the XR and right in their top NAB, it says pint XR and compare.
So you can go right there and say, well, I'm not sure which one I want click on that compare button. And it gives you that example of, you know, which one do you want to buy the pint or the XR and explains the differences between them. So I think it's really well done. And then you click on, you know, one of their, their two choices and you're on a product page and their product page is really interesting. It's not a, it's not a traditional product page at all. Second, you get to the product page, it's a full width banner ad with the information overlaid on the product, instead of the normal add to cart button with some images and a slide show with a light light show kind of functionality, none of that, there's just one big banner image behind the background that clearly shows the product, but it's in a lifestyle shoot, not in a white background, a product photo.
And it doesn't really good job to explain, you know, the top value props, you know, here's the range of the product. Here's the top speed it gets that said this page is very rich and graphics. And that's actually a negative here in a second. You know, they've got videos, they've got some really well done videos where, you know, they basically got someone on a, on a skateboard, one of their skateboards, the one wheel, and one of the value props of their skateboard is that because it's got this one big fat tire, it's not just meant for roads. You can take it off road on trails. You can take it on sand at the beach kind of thing. So they've got some really well done videos where, you know, you see somebody in the woods and all of sudden they jump off it and they land in the city kind of thing.
It's like, wow, high production value. So this page has lots of graphics and I keep scrolling and keep scrolling, seeing all these graphics. And it keeps explaining more of the value prop, which isn't so bad. But one of the things it does is at the bottom of that page, it, it upsells me or cross sells me to the other product, right? I've already selected the product that I'm on the XR, but at the bottom of the XR page, it's like, Hey, how about the pint? And I'm, I'm not a fan of confusing people. I'm a big fan of moving them down the funnel and respecting the choices they make. So if they say, Hey, I want to look at an XR. I wouldn't confuse them with a pint that said, let me scroll back up to the top of the page. And I'm talking about, you know, this is the navigation.
I hit the XR link in the, in the nav. And it actually I'm on a product page, but it's, it's weird. I actually don't know how they're doing this. And I didn't spend enough time in the background to figure it out, but there's actually some broken elements on this page. So at the top of the product page, there's some links for financing, design overview reviews. And by one wheel XR, if I click on reviews, for example, it takes me to the same page that all the other links do. I don't see any reviews and that's one of the negatives in the site. There, there are no customer reviews showing on the site yet this nav element talks about them and it's broken. So, you know, there's some wackiness going on there that said when I get to this next level. So it's like this two tier product page, which is kind of weird to me.
But when I get on that next level of product page, I love a couple of things that we're doing here. The first thing you're doing is, you know, I've said, Hey, I want a one wheel XR. So they say, here's the XR. Here's the main value props, select your bundle. And that's just great upselling right there. So there's three different bundles that this XR comes in. And those bundles are, you know, different accessories that you can add to your skateboard, like cases and racks and, and, you know, wheel covers and stuff like that. So they got the three different bundles. I, like I said, I think that's absolutely wonderful upselling people right there on the product page. The one negative I'd throw at that is if you don't want any of their bundles, the experience for the, just get me the board please is a little bit, it's not clear that I'm actually, when I, you know, there's, there's a button there.
It says I don't like deals by just the board. When you click on that, it actually adds just the boards of the cart. And that that's not intuitive to me when I, before I clicked that button. I don't know that that's what that button is going to do. So if I was them, what I would do is I would have their three bundles and a fourth column for the, you know, the raw bundle or whatever you want to call it with just the board and the charger that it comes with, but they do a really good job with, you know, the iconography for the different value props. And they're, they're really clear and consistent. You can tell that they made their own icons instead of just picking stock photography up for all of them. Some of them probably stock photography, but you know, other ones are made on their own.
And, you know, like I said, they're consistent. So their branding is showing up throughout really well. And they've also got the Klarna upsell messaging on, on this page. Now, one of the things is, you know, these, these board I'm looking at right now is $1,799 and shipping is free for it. So they're doing a pretty good job of promoting the fact that there's free shipping. It says running into the price shipping free. They've also got a really nice in there their top bar on the header today's status is what it says with a colon. And then it says we're shipping free ground shipping on all orders, over a hundred dollars USA. So I think that's fabulous that especially in this time of the Corona virus, and by the way, I'm recording this on a Sunday. So I don't know if they're actually in the warehouse on a Sunday shipping, but the website does say that they are.
So that just tells me as a customer. And you can imagine people that are buying a $1,800 skateboard are just going to be absolutely nuts to get it right. They're gonna be waiting, waiting, waiting. So telling the customer that, yeah, if you order right now, we're in the warehouse and we're going to ship it to you. That's really good feedback for them. So the product page is actually because they have that two cheered product page where there's a lot of visuals on one page, the decision one where I'm actually adding products to the cart is actually a pretty simple page. It's not, there's not a lot of clutter on it. I just pick which bundle I want. I'm just going to click on the one where it says, you know, I just want to buy the board and what that does. It takes you to the cart.
The cart is pretty generic, right? There's no upselling cross selling going on here. So I've just added an $1,800 board to my cart with no accessories. That'd be a great time to say, Hey, are you sure you don't want this accessory or that accessory? Because the bundles, you know, came pre-configured with these 17 things. Well, maybe only want one thing. And I don't know what the most common thing is. We'll just pretend for a second. It's a helmet, right? So why aren't you upselling meats? My one wheel helmet right now, or my one wheel, you know, show you one wheel pride and add a tee shirt to your cart, kind of thing I would in the cart because they have a dedicated cart page. I would definitely be talking about, you know, some sort of upsell or actually cross sell in that case to get them to add something else to their cart, they're already spending $1,800.
It shouldn't be that hard to get another 20, 5,000 out of them at this time that said the cart does a pretty good job of explaining some things like Klarna, Hey, you have a question, call us now, right? They actually publish a phone number. So that's really good trust. They talk about international orders. So there's some information up there. One of the things that doesn't reemphasize here is the free shipping, right? It actually says shipping and taxes calculator to check out, which is probably the standard texts that came with the theme, you know, right here, I would also be saying, Hey, there's free shipping for us and reinforcing that value prop for those customers. And then if I go into the checkout experience, here's, here's one of the other negatives for the one wheel guys who, you know, in my, you know, best good, bad.
These were the best yet. I thought one wheel, you know, really, really knocked it out of the park with their site. But in the checkout, they're missing a couple branding opportunities. They have not matched the colors in the checkout with the colors of their brand. Their brand is actually another, they're using blue for buttons, but it's actually a different color of blue. It's the default blue that shows up inside of the checkout experience. And they didn't put their logo in and for a site with such great original photography. There was no background image here. There's no banner. I would actually probably have some sort of really whited out background image of the product in action or something like that. Just to keep reinforcing, because it's such a visual site, I'd reinforce that visual Allity inside of the checkout. And at the very least, you know, you need your logo there, but overall, you really good site.
Now there's going to be two purchase scenarios in this type of product, right? And we just went through the first one, Hey, I'm buying one of your products. You know, one of your high ticket items, I want one of your skateboards, the other one's going to be for the returning customers who own a skateboard, right? And they're going to come back and buy replacement parts or accessories or upgrades and that kind of stuff. And if I look at their, you know, accessories, a part of their shopping experience, they actually do a decent job with it. Where what they do is they, you know, they have a nav menu that allows you to select what type of skateboard of theirs that they have. And now they're only selling to right now, but in their history, they've had four different ones. And you can say, I've got a one wheel and one wheel plus XR, a pint and pick on whichever board you have.
And it shows the appropriate accessories for that board. So I really like that. Allowing people to self-select, you know, I'm looking for accessories for my product. This is what my product is. Tell me what's available kind of thing. I like that. So that is one wheel really nice site. I really was impressed by them. And actually, let me take a step back. And I want to talk about for each of these stores, you know, one wheel it's obvious that this is a company that, you know, actually let me talk about their, about page. If I go to their, our story page, here's actually one of their other negatives is I clicked on our story on their header and it gave me a dropdown of about us pressing careers. And it didn't take me to any page. I now have to select one of these three things, and I'm not a fan of that.
I'm, I'm a fan of, you know, having a dropdown, let me see other choices. But if someone clicks that top element, our story, I think it should take them somewhere. And not just show the menu that said, when I go to the about us page, they actually do a decent job of explaining a little bit of their history, right? They're an American company invented they're in Santa Cruz, California, which gives them, you know, really good street cred for, for this type of audience. They talk about their founders, CEO. Kyle, my only recommendation would be for them to have a little more imagery that is actually of their team and founders, because what I can't tell in all the photos that are showing down below, they look a lot, like they're just, the models are people that they've, you know, done photo shoots with as opposed to the actual team.
So it's a lot of product shots and lifestyle shots with the product we're on the, our story. I'd rather they talk about the people and absolutely, absolutely those people should be on the one wheel and living that lifestyle. But I would rather see them tell more of the story and show more of the people behind one wheel because you know, it's one of the nice things about their story, right? We invented this because you know, none of the skateboards out there met our needs. And you know, I'm a guy here in the United States and this is what I've done. I think that would be a great, because they're obviously marketing mostly to the United States. And because this is a company that only makes one product, right, as opposed to a larger manufacturer, who's just copycatting other people's products and technologies and selling it on Alibaba, that kind of thing.
You definitely get the feel that, you know, one wheel was invented by an inventor. Who's really enthusiastic is authentic. And I just carry that through a little more on the about page with some photos of the team. Now let's move on to evolve skateboard. So on the homepage for evolve skateboards, the first thing they do is they have a banner image, full width, banner image, and it's two people going down this crazy S curve mountain. And the, the people in the image are really small, which isn't a bad thing, right? It just shows that they're off in the distance. They've gone that far away kind of thing. And one of these people has their hands above their head like that part of the photo is absolutely fantastic. The photo is awesome, right. But then on top of that, they've got $200 off bamboo GTR models.
So the merchandising, and I'm not a fan of merchandising in your homepage banner, right? Your homepage banner, your top. And whether it's a banner or a video like one wheel did the purpose of that in my mind is to let people know they've landed on the right site. Here's what we sell. Here's our value prop to you. So it should say, you know, this is where you get the baddest of the bad of electric skateboards, you know, for people who want to live this kind of lifestyle, that's the kind of message I would have there instead of talking about our promotion right now. And, and it's in that promotion, you know, I don't know if those are GTR models in that photo or not. And then they've got another thing underneath that on the banner image. Right. And, and I may actually just check, yeah.
That text is embedded in the banner image too. So it's probably not going to be that responsive. It also says $25 of every board will be donated to meals on wheel America. I understand, you know, a lot of companies try to, you know, have that charity tie in and you know, there's, there's some good times to do it and there's some bad times to do it. I'm not going to say that they shouldn't have this charity contribution. I just don't think it should be front and center on this homepage banner. Right. And you know, and the reality for me is if I'm going to spend $2,400 on a skateboard, is it really going to make a difference to me, whether $25 of that goes to a charity when I'm making that purchase? Isn't I might feel better about making that purchase decision. Like, Hey, it's okay.
I spent $2,400 on a skateboard because some of them went to a charity, right? That's the reason for me, this company should have a charity component, but I don't think it should be on the homepage. The first thing you see, because I don't think it's going to make you purchase the board. I think it's gonna push you over the edge to make a purchase. I think it's gonna make you feel better after the fact about your purchase. So that's kind of content I would have elsewhere in that shopping experience, but not front and center. Now scrolling down the, you know, the rest of the homepage, you know, this company, electric skateboards are four wheeled, skateboards, not one wheeled ones. And they have right now three different models. So, you know, they do some, you know, as, as featured in, you know, logos to give them self some authenticity.
And then below that they show a big an image for each of the models. And, you know, they're called the stoke, the bamboo GTR series, carbon GGR series with the shop now buttons with no explanation whatsoever about the differences between them. So I actually think that could not have done a worse job there. And then the three photos that are showing one is of a person on a skateboard from a top down view. Another is a guy walking on air, holding his skateboard, which is a cool shot, but just seems out of place here. Cause when I look at this, right, all I see is this guy floating in air. I'm not, I'm no longer seeing the fact that I should be making the decision about which skateboard that I want to buy. And then the third one is a, you know, some enthusiastic person, all excited about their board, but it's not really an action shot.
And you know, they're standing still. And then right below that they actually do a good job of a guy having a blast on a skateboard. So evolve is done just like one wheel, a fabulous job with photography, right? They've shot all their own photography. And they're showing it all across the world and all these different environments, different types of people, a lot of diversity going on, absolute fabulous job on photography and videos. Also at the bottom of this page, they actually have a kind of a cute video. They do a day in the life of one of their their customers, you know, and he goes to work on a skateboard and he comes home and he goes out and plays on his skateboard kind of thing. And it's, it's, it's just awesome. It's really well done. High production value on that video.
So kudos to them for that. And then they, this site actually has customer reviews and they're showing those right on, on the homepage. And, you know, especially for these high ticket items, customer reviews are just, I think so, so important because what their customers are going to say is going to inform so many people. So here here's one I'm actually 53 years old and I'm looking at this video right now and it says I'm 52 year old, 52 years old and loving my evolve, you know, board, I'm like, Oh, people, my age can actually buy these things and enjoy them kind of thing. Right. That resonates to me. And you know, every review is going to raise it to this different people and you know, your customers are going to trust your, your other customer's words more than your own words. So I'm a huge fan of actually putting customer reviews, you know, in lots of places on your shopping site and these guys have done it right on their homepage.
And then they've got some links to their, their Instagram feed with some really nice photos on that, you know, showing the variety of photography that exists on their social feeds. Talk about the homepage size, right? So if I open up my Chrome console for this one and hit refresh on that page, so their page weight is much, much higher than the one wheel and it takes a little bit longer to load up. So it just took me seven seconds to load the full page or five seconds for the first load. And now it's still loading assets after that, that are below the fold kind of thing. I've got 19.8 megabytes of resources, you know, it's massively heavy page. So as your first page, you might not want to have it that massive that said right, their brand, right in this space, we're seeing that imagery is really, really important.
So maybe you need to have that many assets, but they could be optimized a little better. And one example is if I look at their largest photo on the site, it's actually 2.1 megabytes for one of their navigational elements. So that they've got a background photo for the Garbin carbon GTR series. And that image is just 2.1 megs. So they just didn't optimize that at all. Right? So there, there's definitely some, some things that they could do and their next asset down looks to be their their banner. Yeah. Their banner image and that's 665 K. And I would think that they could get that a lot smaller than that if they did some optimization. So, you know, they should be able to keep those visual assets and reduce the weight of that page significantly by doing some optimization. Now, if we look at, you know, the, the product shopping experience, right, they even have at the top a link that says compare boards.
So, you know, there's three boards to pick from this should be an easy page. And here's the thing is they actually turn those three boards into five. And then the page gives a really, really long list of all these features and specs. I'm scrolling and it's like scrolling forever. There's lots of text on here. It's hard to see the differences between them. For example, I'm looking at motor and the first three, the motors are all identical. The T it's the four lines of texts about the motors. All, all five of the products have the exact same motors. So that really doesn't help me compare my boards or make a decision on which one I want it just clutters the page. So this page should be much, much smaller. Right. And it should be really clear what the differences are between the boards or why I would choose the different boards.
Right. I think they do a little bit of that on their shop page. Let's check that out. Yeah. And the shop page should do a little better job where they break down the three products, stoke bamboo GTR series and carbon series, and try to give a little explanation of the differences between them. The problem with that is their data's a little bit inaccurate. And every time I come to their site that the data looks different. So, you know, I'm looking right now, they have these, these two boards that are called the GGR and you can get it in bamboo or carbon. And it really doesn't explain to me why I want bamboo versus carbon on this page. Right? Maybe I want bamboo, I don't know why people buy a bamboo skateboard versus a carbon one. I would guess it's either looks or performance. Well, you know, tell me, you know, you guys are the experts.
Tell me which one of these I want, if I want a classic old school look and that's bamboo, then, you know, great if I want carbon because it performs better and carves better and tighter turning radius. Tell me that information. It just gives you a few stats here and doesn't really let me understand why one of these over the other. And then I've noticed, and I'll show you here. I'm going to click on the, learn more about the bamboo GTR. And when I click on that, the stats actually change a little bit. So, you know, the page I was on a second ago, it told me that the range for this skateboard was 10 miles. I clicked down a level and it tells me that the range is either 31 miles or 19 miles, depending on which wheels I'm using. Cause different wheels have different affect the life of the battery differently.
So, you know, just that kind of accuracy and attention to detail and being that far off in your own data on your site, you know, those are the kinds of things that, you know, just show to me that they're a little bit more sloppy than, than I would want them to be. If I was spending a couple thousand dollars on their website, basically, you know, what I'm saying is that evolve could do a better job and making customers understand the differences between their boards, so they know which one to purchase. But when I go into a product page, they actually have, you know, I can get a carbon board as an example with one wheel type, a different wheel type or both wheels in one. And what they've done is they've broken those out into three different product pages, which is unnecessary. They could have had that as one product page with a variance between the three.
So I've, I've gotten that far down. Let me make that decision then. Cause there may be some other options going on there. Now that said just like the one wheel guys, their product page is unorthodox. And I mean that an absolutely good way. They've got that full width banner ad of the product in use lifestyle shot instead of the traditional, here's our slide show of product photos. And it really looks fabulous on this one. They're telling me, you know, there's 59 reviews for this board. I can see that I can buy it through payments through affirm. Now here's the next thing about evolves website that I do not like at all. Right? So they, they have product protection and it's offered by a company called extend. I've never used them before, but they actually show their branding here. For whatever reason here I am.
I'm looking at right now, a $2,200 electric skateboard, and I can get one year of protection for $229. I can get two years of protection for $409 and I can get three years of protection for $599. Those are large items, you know, that's, that's, you know, if I'm spending $2,200 on a, on a board, if I went three years protection, $600 more that could scare people away showing that price here right now. Now getting added protection may be a great thing, right? Maybe you should get an extended warranty plan for skateboard. I, I don't know. I've never bought one of these. So I don't know if the, the warranty plan is justified or not, but showing that the warranty plan, right, right on the add to cart button, right. And they want you to add the protection as one of your options for the purchase.
I would save that as a post purchase decision. Right. Cause right now my fear for them, I fear for them seeing on their product page, Hey, do you want to, you know, extend your warranty by, you know, three, five or $600. That's going to scare people away. I think that it's going to affect their conversion in a negative way. If I was them, I would offer that after the sales, because it's not a product that needs to be shipped. So once you purchase one of these and they ship it to you, then you could send a series of emails saying, Hey, do you want to get extended warranty protection and not scare people away before they're purchasing? But just reinforcing after the fact, the rest of the product page is really nice with, you know, graphics and videos, you know, all custom shots stuff that they've done.
Absolutely. Like I consistently are saying absolutely fantastic. They have a neat little product photo. Or if you hover over or click on these little pluses, it tells you what the different, you know, features are of the board. That's kind of cool. I would maybe not make that have to be clicked. Cause now I have to click like seven different things to get all these different features. They could have just shown it on the image, but still it's really nice, really well done. High quality photography there. They've also got iconography on their site. That's consistent. And then they show their customer reviews. Now just like one wheel, I get to the bottom of the product page that I'm looking at for a $2,200 product. And instead it's cross selling me on the bamboo version instead of the CA the carbon conversion. I don't understand why these companies are doing that.
Maybe they've got data that shows it actually works. It doesn't intuitively does not make sense to me. I would re on a product page respect that customer's decision. And if they want to, you know, start over again, or, you know, actually now that I think about it, maybe what it's actually showing is they need to do a better job with the critique I'm giving them explaining to people more clearly what the differences between the products are and walking them through that purchase making decision. So they're more confident in the decision that they're making. Of course I could just be, just find my own opinions with that, but who knows. And then one of the last images on this one, I absolutely love on this product page. And it says what's in the box and it actually, you know, shows you all the other things you get with your skateboard.
Like, yes, it comes with a, you know, a recharge recharger that, you know, has a plug and it's got a control and it's got a wrench and it's got all this and that. So you see all the other little things that come with your purchase. I think it's really nicely done. And then if I let's go back up to the top of that product page, if I actually add it to my cart without any of that extended warranty garbage. And so I didn't add the warranty, I didn't know this was going to happen. And I added it to the cart. They've got a fly out cart, which I'm not a fan of, but that said, they've got a popup, you know, next to the fly out cart, a popup saying, are you sure you don't want, and actually, let me give you the actual words, protect your purchase from defects breakdowns, and more with extent.
So that's, to me, horrible wording, right? Protect your purchase from defects defect. Shouldn't that, that should be part of the standard warranty in my mind. Right? I actually like the protect your purchase from breakdowns. They're talking about and more with extend, but they've got this popup, are you sure you don't want to spend 600 more dollars to get this added protection? So like I said, I think that's pretty bad. It just makes me think their product quality is poor. That may not be true. Right? I'm not saying that they have poor quality products, just the way that they're merchandising this extended warranty makes me think that. So I would just, like I said, do that differently now in their fly out cart, there are doing something that I like, and that is that they're cross selling me to some lights. So not only can I get this great electric skateboard, but I can put some lights on it too.
Right? So in the cart, there's, you know, CNBC was shred lights. So I liked that in the cart, a little cross sell thing. If I was them, I would actually show a price there because it doesn't show a price. So the customer is a little bit more informed, but I like that cross selling on the cart. Now, if I go to the checkout they actually do in the checkout have a pretty bland one. They did add their colors to it and their logo. But once again, because they're so visually rich and the rest of the site, it actually is jarring to go to this white with a really light gray on one side background. I would put a little imagery in here, whether it be with the banner or the background images, just to have more consistency because I'm so used to this, you know, rich graphical experience throughout now on the evolve site here, if you know, we talked on the one wheel about the shopping experience and then the, you know, buying parts on the evolve.
If I go to parts, let me just click on accessories in their top nav. There's no navigation here for things by for my specific product. So I can't say, Hey, I've got this board or that board show me what works with it. They just show all of their stuff. So that's a little bit of merchandising that they could help their customers with is saying, Hey, here's the things that are compatible with your board. And I didn't see anywhere on their site, any sort of community. And of course they probably have some community through their Facebook and Instagram so that that's, you know but no sort of forum kind of stuff. Like the one wheel guys did that I thought was really nice. Let's talk about our story with evolve. So evolve is actually an Australian company. This website is their us website for their us customers, but they are an Australian company.
So just like one wheel, you know, they've actually got a pretty authentic story of, Hey, you know, this, the founder was really passionate, invented this product themselves. We've been working on it for 10 years kind of thing. So as opposed to a manufacturing company that just adds another product to its lineup evolves got some pretty real street cred in this space. And if you look at, there are story page on a site that was so rich and graphics and videos, there's not a single video or graphic or image on the, our story page. It talks about us, which gives you a couple of paragraphs. They tell you where, you know, from Australia kind of thing, name of their founder for, for all the work they've done in, in making their site pop so well on the rest of their pages they're their, our story page did some significant work.
So let's move on to eco trick and eco trick is electric bicycles. So one wheel was the great example. Evolve was the good example. And ego trick is the really bad example. You can see it right here on the home page, above the fold. I have four bands of things going on before I get to the fifth band, which is the main nav. So the first one is some warning message that, Hey, there's a lot of people out there copying us. Don't trust them. They suck. The second one is a subscribe now button where you have to actually check the box to opt in to get your coupon. And the wacky thing about that is if you look closely, it's, it's basically a red band with some objects in the background of it. Those objects are Shopify logos. It has nothing to do with their site, right.
It's powered by Shopify, but there's no need for Shopify logos up there. And then they've got another one. That's some value props of free shipping. 30 day trial is 0% financing, 18 months warranty, not bad. Right. You know, I would put those in different places and I'm clicking on them and I don't, Oh, they do go somewhere. Okay. And then the last one is echo trick bikes, manual, read more. And then I click on that and it actually opens up a PDF of their manual. So this is basically for people who own their bike, I just would not put that on the top of every page on their website. And then as you start going through the eco trick site, they don't have any lifestyle photography, right? Even this image just showed up and they've got a rotating banner, which I am definitely not a fan of.
Right. So they're doing that merchandising in there, their homepage banner, instead of setting context about what they're about the image that just popped up, talks about new arrivals. There's other ones about, you know, dif there's a father's day campaign. There's another one here about another new arrival, but each of those images that they show in that rotating banner ad, some of them have a product shot overlaid any, you know, you can completely tell it's it's Photoshop, overlaid on a background. Some of them are not so bad. Some of them are absolutely awful Photoshop jobs. And some are just, you know, pure product shots with some graphics or some other elements thrown around it. I saw some one somewhere on their site where they had a bike on a road with no person on it, just the bike and the bike looked like, you know, the size of a Winnebago compared to the size of the road kind of thing.
So no attempt for any sort of authenticity behind what they're doing with these stock photos that they're using on their site. So as I scroll down their homepage, you know, they say that their manufacturer manufacturer direct, you're going to notice, as I keep saying things, I'm going to be reading verbatim what they say. And the grammar is obviously foreign, right? Right now they're there. The site is trying to sell to Americans and this company actually tries to make you think they're an American company, which we'll talk about in a little bit. And there they do not appear to be, I'm not saying they're not an American company, but they do not appear to be. So there's a lot of poor grammar throughout the site, but I scroll down, well, here, here's the image I'm looking at now of, of the, the bike looking massive on this, this background completely unrelated.
They just slapped the image on, and then they even have an image on their site of a bicycle. For whatever reason. There's a, there's a bicycle in this, this background image and it's of an old non-electric bike, completely unrelated to what they do. They just grabbed a stock photo and threw it up there. So let's look at their shopping experience and it's kind of confusing. Cause they got this thing at the top called preorder zone where they list all their bikes out and then they got another one with e-bike and I think the list is fairly similar. So like are all their bikes on preorder or not? So I'm just going to click on the e-bike one and see what it gives me because they've got a lot of different models. It looks like 10 or 12 different models of e-bikes. When I click on that first e-bike link, all I get is a collection page.
Right. Which shows all of their bikes with no clear differentiation. There's no filters, no anything. I don't know if they come in different colors, different products or different colors. Okay. I was wondering if there's gonna be swatches or something for color. And they, all, many of them are sold out, not all of them. So maybe some are back-ordered versus pre-ordered or maybe they're pre-order and they just have the, the, the verbiage wrong kind of thing. But I'm going to click on one of their bikes. So the collection page doesn't help you make a decision at all, right. It's just a side shot of the bikes and you can see all the bikes and in one, you know, big array, which is fine, but it doesn't give you there's nothing before that. There's no filters to say, you know, these are men's styles or women's styles road off road 20 inch tires, 28 inch tires, whatever.
There's nothing to help you make those decisions. So I'm going to click on a leopard electric mountain bike. The products do look pretty cool by the way they look like they're, they're fun electric bikes, but once again, they look like that, but I've not seen a single photo of a person on a bicycle of theirs on this entire site, right? So it's all product photography and they've got a traditional product page where they show a price and some reviews and they have, they've got a series of images and you can hover over it and it'll expand it. You can click on it and get the light box. Oh, you can't click on these and get the light box view, but you can, you know, go through the different series of product photos. Right now, I'm looking at a product that's a 48 volt fat tire, portable and folding electric bike with LCD supply L LCD display, black and blue.
That's the product title. And if I look at the product description, it is three lines of text. There's a specifications tab, which has a bunch of spec stuff, which doesn't look that interesting to me. There are four reviews for this product. And the first review has more texts than the product description. This company is not doing a really good job in marketing their products, right there. There's no imagery of people using it. There's no videos of how to use it or where to do things. There's no explanation. And the descriptions are pretty short. If I take that product now and add it to the cart, they've got a popup cart. And on that cart page, there's no cross sell upsell going on. If I view the cart, let's see if they give it to me in a full page mode, they give me a full page mode.
And on this page, I get to estimate shipping and tax. And I'm not a fan of shipping calculators on a cart page, especially when you offer free shipping, right? This company offers free shipping yet. They've got an estimate shipping and tax calculator, which makes me think, well, is there free shipping or is there not? And now I'm confused. What I want to do here is take you to their, about page, about us. So here I am on the about us page and it talks about the hit. The title of it is the history of eco trick. And I am going to literally read word for word. What is the first paragraph at the beginning of the 21st century, graduated from the famous design colleges and universities, Rhode Island, school of design Miller Evans due to keen on cycling and outdoor sports. At the same time in the United States, cycling and outdoor cycling lifestyle are all the rage become the mainstream of the middle-class leisure lifestyle.
That is all one sentence. There's some commas semi-colons and wacky stuff going on there. But to me, that's just an obvious sign that this company is not native English speaking. And then, you know, if you look on their site, they'll, they'll actually talk about somewhere on their site. They talk about, you know, the fact that they're in Oakland, California, right? And they publish an a United States phone number. So they're, they're trying to seem American, but they can't even get someone to copy, edit their their about page, by the way, they may have great products. You know, what I'm criticizing them for right now or critiquing them for is the design of their website and how they're presenting their products and what their purchase making decisions are. Their products may be absolutely fine. I don't know. I haven't investigated that at all. All I'm saying is, you know, if you're going to spend a thousand to $2,000 on a bicycle, most customers want to get a little better sense of confidence about the company they're dealing with.
And this website does not do a good job at that. So that's three websites that I wanted to review for you. One wheel, which is really nice example of a high end product that does a great job in merchandising. Decision-Making with great visuals that they created for themselves evolve. Another high end product with a high price point does a really good job with high visuals. My biggest critique for them was a little bit about the consistency of their messaging and helping the customers walk through the purchase making decision. And then the last one was eco trick another, a high priced item. But I think they did a really poor job in evoking confidence from me in, in their brand and their service and their product photography was okay, but their lifestyle photography was nonexistent. And I'm really, you know, hesitant to buy from a company like that because, you know, poor grammar on, you know, when you're supposed to be an American student and you can't write a complete sentence, I'm more than concerned about that. So they fail with me on the trust side of things. So hopefully me just randomly spewing off my feedback and comments about these sites for a little bit of time was useful for you. You know, but my goal here is that there's some content or some feedback that I've given about these sites that you can use an in and benefit from for your store.
So thanks for listening.