The beauty industry undergoes serious changes every year. Both makeup and skincare products are gradually starting to fulfill more significant functions, equal to solutions that used to be available only in the offices of plastic surgeons and dermatologists. It is for this reason that the demand for beauty products is gradually increasing. The average age of the consumer is also decreasing (a whole niche of makeup for children has now appeared), and the number of target audience subcategories is also expanding (male beauty products are a surprise to no one in today’s world). This growth is proven by official statistics.

In connection with these obvious perspectives, we decided to devote this article to answering the question of how to make a beauty commerce website.

Industry Statistics

With the emergence of Instagram, more and more people are becoming dissatisfied with their own appearance. It used to be mostly women who were guilty of such self-doubt. Nowadays, men are also prone to having issues related to their body image. A survey back in 2016 showed that only 28% of men and 26% of women were completely satisfied with their looks.

At the same time, this century’s beauty industry continues to rapidly make money for its companies. The niches of dietary supplements, portable beauty devices for home use, and standard beauty products like face creams and lipsticks have constant new developments and formulas. A correctly chosen marketing strategy arouses genuine interest from millions of people.

World-famous online beauty stores such as Lookfantastic, Feelunique, Ulta, Sephora, Strawberrynet, and iHerb receive billions in profits annually. They regularly treat their guests to both discounts and limited editions of luxury products, which are usually purchased for a collection. If you, too, have an idea of how to surprise and attract buyers who care about their looks, you should definitely look into beauty e-commerce web development.

Online Beauty Store: How to Do It Right

So let's talk about the things you need to focus on during health & beauty ecommerce store development.

Choosing the format of your future online store

To begin with, decide on the format of your future online store: will it be multi-brand, or do you want to focus on one or two brands? The answer, in fact, is quite simple: if you have established contact with wholesale suppliers of at least 30 brands, this is an excellent reason to develop an online supermarket. Your main task here is to offer the best prices and the fastest service. The second option is to offer customers a more limited range of products from one beauty brand (or perhaps two or three from the same niche). In this case, your site should be presented in the format of an online guide for solving a specific problem. That is, the marketplace itself becomes only an auxiliary tool for your visitors and serves to meet their needs. At the same time, your main activity should be focused on providing unique information, for example, recommendations for combating the signs of aging skin or acne. In this case, you can create a selection of skincare products that actually work to appear in your recommendations.

Designing the website taking into account the chosen format

Your website’s design will depend on which category of products prevails. Suppose you build an information site for those who are looking for solutions to problems related to skin aging (offering, of course, a carefully selected range of anti-age products). In this case, it would be advisable to design the site using medical paraphernalia (white, blue or green color scheme, discrete fonts, images of test tubes, etc.). Conversely, if this is an ordinary multi-brand store, you will definitely need to use the trendiest shades, place promotional photos from the latest collections by well-known makeup manufacturers (of course, ones that you offer for sale), as well as create a convenient navigation and search system, with a variety of filters and criteria.

Developing the cart functionality

Most ready-made CMS engines provide the cart functionality by default. However, in order to make beauty e-commerce website development as productive as possible, experts recommend using additional tools. In particular, such marketing add-ons as reservation of products for an hour, sending email notifications with reminders about abandoned products in the user's cart, and an instant generator of promotional codes, etc., work particularly well. The main thing is not to overdo it with making the pop-ups and messages unnecessarily intrusive.

Forming the catalog and product pages

The way you present your products will play an enormous role in shaping the conversion rates for your platform. So, for hypermarket sites, developers are increasingly using mega-menus, as well as creating a lot of filters for the most convenient search. If we talk about product pages, they should be extremely informative and useful for buyers (this is a job for a content manager). Using high-quality images taken by a staff photographer would be a great advantage, as well as adding tabs with the composition and reviews of the product. And, of course, let’s not forget such effective methods as the “people who bought this product also purchased...” carousel or the history of the viewed products.

Integrating social network APIs

In order to simplify the registration procedure on your site as much as possible, link the API of well-known social networks. This way you can not only reduce the number of steps needed to perform the target action, but also increase the security of the authentication procedure.

Connecting a chat bot

If you want your service to boast a top-notch level of service, it’s not enough to offer next-day delivery, a flexible system of discounts and fairly low prices. The customers should also be given, among other things, the opportunity to consult sellers in live time mode (for example, to order products that are currently not in stock, or to ask for advice regarding the choice of a particular product). You can do this by creating a special chat bot. Such software solutions automatically generate answers to the typical questions - for example, how long is the wait for the product, while for the most extraordinary questions they connect the buyer with a human representative.

And of course, when you create your beauty commerce website, do not forget to use all sorts of SEO and other modules aimed at increasing the size of the average check: women make impulsive purchases quite often, so such marketing features show very good results.

How Much Does Creating a Beauty Commerce Website Cost?

And now a few words about the cost. In fact, it depends on the number of products presented, the design, the hours spent working on the backend, the cost of the hosting provider’s services, and ultimately the need to develop several language versions. Regarding minimum prices, if you engage Eastern European developers, this service will cost you about $20,000. Of course, the final cost will be determined only after discussing the customer’s requirements with the development team.

Conclusion

To summarize, as you can see, the specificity of beauty website development mainly lies in a thorough approach to the site’s design. If you are looking for professionals to create such a solution, we would be happy to help you. Our company Anyforsoft specializes in building online stores based on the Drupal platform in completely different commercial business niches. Therefore, you can be absolutely sure that you will receive a competitive, easily customizable and scalable solution that will fully comply with all requirements for UI and UX.