The AutoPumpkin folks are not just one Shopify site … they’re 3 different Shopify sites:
- AutoPumpkin.co.uk (Serving the United Kingdom)
- AutoPumpkin.de (Germany)
- AutoPumpkin.com (US and such)
They all sell the same or similar stuff … and none of it is pumpkins. All three of those sites were launched in the space of less than a year. All of them are successful. They are running the three sites as a part of a localization strategy. That means that instead of a single site translated into several languages with all of the controls and apps needed to do that, they have created three very similar sites that are tailored to the individual markets.
This is an interesting approach. Since the sites each have less operational overhead, they each load faster with fewer errors. This also allows them to customize the content regionally much more effectively. But the traffic is split and so are things like SEO value. They must believe it’s worth it in their case. The US is their most successful Shopify store by far. Germany gets about half the traffic as the US site. And The UK site – the one we will look at today – only gets about 12% the traffic of the US site.
Anyway … AutoPumpkin – again, NOTHING to do with actual pumpkins – sells add-on car electronics and entertainment systems of various sorts. And it looks like business is good. The main line of products are replacement units that turn a car’s standard car radio slot into a touch screen entertainment center.
The Shopify Theme That They Use
I expected that each of these AutoPumpkin sites would use the same theme … but they don’t. And I can’t understand why at all. In fact, the US and Germany sites each have different custom themes. While the UK site uses a very nice – but heavily modified – standard premium theme. If the UK site theme works, why waste the cash on custom theme development at all?
Anyway … the UK site uses the Warehouse theme by our god friends at Maestrooo. Take a look at the theme here.
What They Do Well
The site looks a bit old-school, but it works.
The shopping cart works and has a nice fake savings alert to encourage progress through the checkout process.
The main navigation gets right down to business.
I want to say more nice things. How about this … the site is extremely average in it execution.
What Needs to Be Improved
Nowhere on the site could I find the reason that the business is called AutoPumpkin. This is a little bit maddening. But, I also recognize I will now likely NEVER forget the name of the business because it makes so little sense that it is memorable … which makes complete marketing sense … which means that I now my head is going to explode.
Is there a more boring set of product pages with less attention to detail and SEO value than this one? Don’t like that one? Well, they got PLENTY of product pages set up by lazy mountain goats.
The Shopify Apps They Use
If you see an app or widget on their site that you like, you might be able to identify the specific tool they are using here in this section. We used our top-secret Shopify scanning tools to determine that this site is using the following apps and plugins:
- Lucky Orange — Real-time analytics and monitoring.
- Automizely — Traffic generator for eCommerce.
- Bugsnag — The snagger of bugs of the coding kind.
- Yotpo — Social media widget.
- PayPal — Express payment option (just this one).
- Doubleclick — Ad network.
Wow … that’s only six apps. That’s impressive.
Marketing Stuff They Do
All three of the AutoPumpkin sites are aggressively collecting email addresses … good for them. But this helps during the holiday sales season especially. Each of the three AuroPumpkin sites appears to have its own social media accounts. The UK version that we reviewed there has Facebook and YouTube. The YouTube channel is described as a Support Portal, but that stuff yields marketing benefits for sure.
The Facebook page has very few organic posts and I could not find any social media ads … which is downright odd for a consumer products business like this.
They are doing some paid search advertising, and I have posted 3 example ads below for your review and reference.
But let me tell you where these guys are likely getting their traffic and sales … backlinks. Look like they have nearly 1600 active backlinks in some kind of a referral set up. So they are paying for their traffic, but based upon sales generated which is manageable if you can get the right pages to link to you.
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