Personalization Audit: TeeFury

Got a hobby? Interest? Favorite show or video game? We'll bet that Shopify brand TeeFury has got a tee to show off your loves. This pop culture-focused print on demand shop sells hundreds of one-of-a-kind designs (and counting) with a unique timer-based promotion for their latest styles. Given the brand's focus on personal interests and likes, we were curious to dive in and see how they're helping shoppers find more of what they love. New to our series of Personalization Audits?

TeeFury personalization strategy audit

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The very idea behind a store like TeeFury is personalization, so naturally we were curious to see how they were doing at personalizing the actual shopping experience, and not just their product line.

TeeFury was started by a group of designers with a mission to create interesting and limited edition designs, often inspired by world of comics, video games, and 'geek' culture. A unique feature of the site is a brand new limited edition design is released every 24 hours before it's relegated to a gallery with the hopes of being brought 'back to life' through fan votes. This level of urgency keeps TeeFury shoppers hooked on the site to make sure they don't miss a coveted design when it's dropped.

There are other sites that operate on a 'print on demand / print on anything' model similar to TeeFury. But we felt like this brand offered a few unique elements, including their strong focus on pop culture, their limited edition drops, and the fact their site is largely organized in collections associated with specific interests.

This last point is ripe for personalization on the TeeFury site. If a shopper is a fan of one show, TeeFury should ideally be highlighting all the products from that show in hopes of boosting basket sizes. Alternatively, some shoppers may be drawn to a particular aesthetic or a specific designer. Maybe a shopper doesn't want six shirts featuring Game of Thrones; but they might be interested in six shirts from a particular designer who did a Game of Thrones tee, as well as ones for other fan favorite properties like Nintendo or The Walking Dead.

What TeeFury got right

• Home page bestsellers: When you land on the TeeFury site, you're presented with their latest limited edition design (or designs, as shown here). But if that doesn't appeal to you, the brand swiftly follows up with a list of their bestsellers. Assuming these are dynamically selected through smart algorithms on TeeFury's actual bestselling products, this is a great strategy to try and reduce bounce rates and give shoppers somewhere else to go if the feature design isn't something you're particularly interested in.

• Stacked product recommendations: We're a big fan of promoting more than one type of product recommendation on a page, and TeeFury does just that on their product detail pages. Not only that, but their product recommendations are pretty sound, generally linking to the same overall theme of what the featured product you're looking at is, whether from the same 'property' (i.e. multiple Sonic the Hedgehog recommendations in the product above), or the same 'theme' (i.e. in another instance, we looked at a design featuring books, which linked to other designs that promoted a love of books).

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Areas for TeeFury to enhance

• Sub-product recommendation experience: Once you click into a variation of a TeeFury product, such as a women's tee or a mug, the Recommended For You product recommendations block actually disappears altogether. Apart from the value this block would create in driving higher average order values (AOV), it's also missing an opportunity to not refresh based on the selected product. A customer browsing mugs or women's tees should be served products, including the best sellers block that does remain, that match this same 'style'. Keeping only the default best sellers block with tees feels like a missed opportunity to create a more seamless shopping experience overall.

• Upsell or cross-sell at checkout: TeeFury does offer a cross-sell window as a pop up. On the upside, it's very in your face and hard to ignore. On the downside, there's a few improvements we could suggest. The box only appears when you click 'Checkout', not when you add to cart. If you close it out, we weren't able to get it to trigger again, despite adding more products to the cart. Many shoppers are conditioned to close pop-ups at this point, and may actually be aggravated if they missed a cross-sell they were interested in via their haste to close the box. We'd suggest looking at an in-cart cross-sell instead that shoppers can always return to, and will see before they're in the mindset to actually check out as well. While we liked that there was a 'You May Also Like' box in the cart, it's not particularly prominently displayed on the page and may be missed by most shoppers.

Missed personalization opportunities for

TeeFury

• Product recommendations and content by designer: We've already established that designers are a key part of the TeeFury ecosystem; so much so, you can browse designs by artist. But it feels like there is a lot more TeeFury could be doing with this data. For example, they could have a block on the home page for customers that frequently buy from a particular artist, showing them the latest designs from that artist. On a product page, they could add in another recommendations block that spotlights other designs from the artist. And on the artist pages themselves, they could have a product recommendations block at the top of the page that spotlights that artist's bestselling designs. Assuming some shoppers are loyal or drawn to certain designers, these are all easy ways to drive more revenue and foster loyalty to TeeFury's art community.
• Free shipping progress bar: This is a simple but effective promotion. TeeFury actively promotes their free shipping threshold on their cart page. But they could take things further by including a progress bar that shows how far away a shopper is from getting the free shipping, and by including a reference to products they might like based on what's in their cart.

• Collection page recommendations: As you can see here, TeeFury has a pretty wildly deep product catalog - to the tune of over 12,000 designs to choose from. While they offer filtering options on their collection pages, including their more narrowly defined collections like 'Horror Movies', the brand could take things a step further by using product recommendations to spotlight the best sellers in a specific collection.

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Conclusion

It could be argued that for a site like TeeFury, the best shopping experience is really going to come down to how effective their search is. If you have a specific interest, chances are you're going to just start by looking for what tees they have that match that beloved piece of pop culture. But TeeFury could be leaving money on the table by not taking that search insight and creating a more coherent customer journey from there. Promoting other work by the same artist, creating a better browsing experience for shoppers interested in seeing designs on items other than a men's shirt, and revisiting the in-cart cross-sell experience feel like three easy wins that could pay off big for TeeFury.

There are more advanced use cases we could identify for TeeFury though. The home page spotlights featured collections on a global scale right now. We see opportunity to change the featured collections based on what segment a customer falls into, to drive them to the products and designers that will most resonate with them based on past browsing and buying patterns.

In some cases, their 'Recommended For You' cross-sells seemed to be driving off of questionable logic, like keywords instead of actual 'like' products. For example, viewing a Buffy the Vampire Slayer tee called the 'Sunnydale Slayers Club' design brought up other designs focused on the word 'Club' as opposed to the pop culture property it belonged to. TeeFury could curate more specific collections based on the top 100 or 200 search terms on their site, and use those collections (even if hidden from a normal browsing experience) to create a better product recommendations experience.

In all, we thought TeeFury did a solid job of providing some inspiration to boost your cart size, but there's definitely a few things they could test out to drive more sales and revenue.

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