CalendarClub has their head office in Paris … Paris, Ontario, Canada. They opened their first real-world retail store nearly 30 years ago. They are the largest retailer of calendars and puzzles in Canada. Have you ever gone to the mall during the holiday season and seen those pop-up stores that open in late October and then sell the living daylights out of calendars until they close up in the first week of January?
These guys do that. In fact, each year they open upwards of 250 of those seasonal shops in addition to selling tons of calendars, puzzles, games, and toys all year long through their online shop. Looks like the online store was started in about 2013 or so along with their social media accounts.
And no, the website does not have any products that mention the New Year’s celebration of southern Tibet. But they do have a nice selection of Husky calendars, so good on them.
The Shopify Theme That They Use
As successful as these guys are – they sell a sh*t-load of calendars every year – they are also smart and savvy. They use a nice, standard premium theme — Showtime from Mile High Themes. Specifically, they use the FurnishTime variant. This theme is especially good when you have serval brands and product types. You can see it for yourself here.
What They Do Well
Since they have used a high-quality premium theme and resisted the temptation to junk it up, it is super responsive. The site looks great and is super-easy to navigate on mobile. Open it up on your phone and see for yourself. We do not have access to their internal analytics, but I’ll bet they close a lot of deals on cell phones. They sell a Golden Girls Jigsaw Puzzle and that made me laugh.
The shopping cart is super clean and simple too, but you can see the Express payment options clear as day with big, bold buttons. Buying is a snap.
SEO is decent, but there a little more target content and enhanced alt tags would get them a bunch more free traffic.
What Needs to Be Improved
The shopping cart is actually just a little bit too simple. They are not taking advantage of up-sell and add-ons. Seems like an easy miss.
You know … there are a few apps that allow Shopify stores to ship to multiple locations in a single order. This kind of thing is super valuable for stores that specialize in selling gifts. One example is Multiship by Gist. CalendarClub should take a look and see if that’s a good fit.
The Shopify Apps They Use
We used our top-secret Shopify scanning tools to determine that this site is using the following apps and plugins:
- Elegantsy ‑ Boost store sales by adding badges, labels, stickers and texts
- Also Bought - Premium cross-sell product recommendations. Award-winning App!
- Back In Stock: Customer Alerts - Notify customers: products out of stock, in stock, preorders.
- Chatra: Live Chat, Facebook, Email, Visitor list + Cart Saver
- Frequently Bought Together - Personalized Recommendations, Upsell Bundles and Discounts
- Mailchimp: Email Marketing - Drive traffic and sales with email and marketing automation
- Order Limits ‑ MinMaxify - Minimum and maximum limits on your cart, products and groups
- Product Reviews - The simplest way to share your customers' experiences.
- Stamped Product Reviews & UGC - Collect product reviews, photo reviews, video reviews & UGC
- AfterShip Returns Center - Return Label, Store Credit, Exchange, Return Policy, Refunds
- ProMap ‑ Store Locator - Map Unlimited Number of Dealer/Store Locations on Google Map
- Wishlist Plus - Customizable, collaborative sales, clienteling, save for later
- EqualWeb — Website accessibility compliance tool.
- ShopifyPay/PayPal/ApplePay/GooglePay – These are Express payment options. Love ‘em all.
Are you paying attention? That’s 12 apps.
Marketing Stuff They Do
CalendarClub has 3 social media accounts: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. They are very active on Facebook, somewhat less active on Instagram, and post only occasionally on LinkedIn. It’s interesting that they do LinkedIn at all … most merchants forget all about it, but they shouldn’t. I imagine that calendars as business gifts during the holidays is big business.
They do the biggest chunk of the business every year – by FAR – during the holidays. So, they just are not running a lot of ads right now. I was able to find only 1 social media ad and a handful of search ads which I have included below for your inspiration.
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