According to statistics, women are the most active in purchasing health and beauty products, be it decorative cosmetics, skincare items, or something else. However, in recent years, there has been an increase in male customers, too, which is good news for both offline and online businesses.
Unfortunately, there is a flip side to the coin, namely high competition. And you, being one of the market players, must go the extra mile to convince shoppers to choose your health and beauty online store and ignore similar websites.
Even if you’re offering top-notch goods, it doesn’t guarantee sales growth. Ultimately, customers need to know about your eCommerce resource, which means you can’t do without marketing activities. But promotion alone isn’t enough, either! It’s also crucial to take care of beauty product catalog optimization as a part of your comprehensive visual merchandising strategy.
Let’s discuss this in a proper manner, step by step, and start with the basics, just to be sure we’re on the same page. Then, we’ll proceed to more targeted insights and practical tips.So… how do you approach visual merchandising for your cosmetic products?
Challenges of a Highly Competitive Market
As noted, the health and beauty e-commerce industry is incredibly competitive, with countless brands and products vying for consumers’ attention. Such a highly saturated environment presents several challenges for businesses looking to carve out a space for themselves and thrive:
- The sheer number of competitors. With so many brands offering similar goods, it can be difficult for you to capture the attention of potential customers.
- Constant market evolution. The industry constantly evolves, with new trends and innovations emerging regularly. Staying up-to-date with these changes and adapting to meet consumer needs is a challenging task, too.
- The increasing consumer demand for transparency and authenticity. And finally, customers are becoming more discerning, seeking items that are not only effective but also ethically sourced, sustainable, and free from harmful ingredients. Ensure your product display conveys the desired “green” message; keep that in mind when working on your health and beauty merchandising strategy.
What can you do to make your health and beauty business thrive in these conditions?
Differentiate your brand and products
Differentiation means creating a strong brand identity and unique selling proposition, which is a sure step to attracting and retaining customers. You need to show why you are better than your competitors and what makes you special and worthy of attention.
Differentiation comes in various forms, such as product formulation, packaging design, pricing strategy, or brand values. For example, a brand that focuses on using organic and natural ingredients may attract customers who prioritize sustainability and health.
Use effective cosmetics merchandising to stand out
Health and skincare visual merchandising is a powerful tool that would make your range irresistible for shoppers. To be more precise, it’s about the following:
- Creating engaging, eye-catching product displays: The main goal is to entice customers to explore your catalog further. That’s where vibrant colors, appealing images, and smart product organization come into play: all of these techniques will help you stand out in a sea of options.
- Highlighting unique selling points and benefits: You should clearly communicate the unique features of your products, whether they are cruelty-free, vegan, or contain particular ingredients. This way, you’ll be able to persuade customers to choose your brand over others.
- Utilizing customer reviews and testimonials: Online reviews also have a significant impact on consumer purchasing decisions, as they build trust and credibility.
Now let’s discuss another vital topic, without which you won’t be able to increase online conversions and sales.
Common Health and Beauty Merchandising Mistakes
Sometimes, businesses focus too much on health and beauty marketing techniques without paying enough attention to other important aspects. As a result, they achieve an influx of users who ultimately don’t become buyers and leave their online stores. The reason is unsatisfactory product display, a poorly structured catalog, and other similar problems.
Let’s look at the most popular mistakes so that you can avoid them and form an effective cosmetics merchandising strategy.
Lack of consistency in product imagery and descriptions
One of the main mistakes is neglecting the imagery and informational content that accompanies your product cards. Therefore, our advice is to take good care of these things:
- High-quality product images: Beauty & health products can look really impressive on the page, so don’t waste your chance to attract more customers and increase conversions in such an easy way.
- Accurate and compelling product descriptions: Customers must understand what they are buying, what effect a particular beauty or health item has, if there are any contraindications, etc. Be sure to include all this information in the product description.
Ignoring the power of storytelling through visuals
There is nothing worse than a boring online store with unattractive design and uninteresting content. Such a website has little chance of surviving in a highly competitive environment; after all, modern customers have plenty to choose from.
The best way to go is to make your health and beauty e-commerce store more noticeable by awakening customers’ emotions through lifestyle imagery. For instance, if you sell skincare products, display pictures of people enjoying a luxurious spa day. It’ll be your special approach to a skincare visual merchandising strategy.
In addition, storytelling through visuals can address common pain points and provide solutions to potential shoppers. For example, an online store selling haircare items should demonstrate how their products solve such issues as frizz, dryness, or lack of volume.
Overwhelming customers with cluttered layouts
Another popular mistake is to overwhelm clients with cluttered layouts. Here are three key methods to avoid this problem and create a user-friendly UI:
- Well-structured design for easy navigation: Clear navigation menus, intuitive categorization, and prominent search features can enhance the overall user experience and help customers navigate through the store effortlessly.
- Strategic use of white space: Incorporate white space around key elements, such as product images and descriptions. Thus, you create a sense of visual balance and help online shoppers focus on individual items without distractions.
- The balance between product variety and clean aesthetics: While it is crucial to offer a wide range of products to cater to different customer preferences, it is equally important to maintain a clean overall aesthetic. Find your middle ground, it’s always the best option.
This last problem, namely an overloaded user interface that interferes with the search process, is worthy of separate discussion. Therefore, we suggest we talk about health & beauty product catalog optimization.
Smart Catalog Management For Beauty Products
The catalog is the basis of any eCommerce store because this is where customers come for online shopping: the less effort and time they spend looking for the desired beauty or health item, the greater the chances they make a purchase. Therefore, you must work on the optimal product display, which includes the following:
- Organizing products into relevant categories. First of all, you need to structure your range into logical groups, such as face creams, hair products, cosmetics, and more. This way, you create intuitive paths to help customers navigate through your online store.
- Utilizing product filters and search options. The second step in beauty product catalog optimization is enhancing user experience with efficient search functionality. Don’t forget to add some relevant filters and implement a sorting system, thus allowing customers to easily find specific items.
- Promoting related products and cross-selling opportunities. A smart idea would be to showcase complementary items next to each other, such as shampoo and hair conditioner or mascara and eye shadow, and use personalized product recommendations. Thus, you stimulate the purchasing activity of your customers and convince them to buy more than planned. By the way, there are special health and beauty merchandising tools designed to simplify your work in this regard, but we’ll talk about them a bit later.
Relevant Trends for Health and Beauty e-Commerce Stores
Let’s talk about health & beauty product marketing strategies, or rather, how to introduce the latest trends into them. It’s mainly about emphasizing the importance of natural ingredients and sustainability since healthy living, eco-friendliness, and everything that comes under the concept of “green lifestyle” are in fashion today.
What can you do about that?
- Communicate product efficacy with visual merchandising techniques. For example, how about before-and-after images and testimonials? You can also use infographics and visual representations of product benefits.
- Promote self-care and wellness through visual storytelling. A good approach to this is to showcase relaxation and pampering experiences and highlight the emotional impact your products have on your customer’s health, beauty, and even life.
Your health and beauty merchandising strategy will greatly benefit from you taking our advice and implementing at least some of these trends.
Tools for Beauty Product Catalog Optimization
It’s time to make good on our promise and discuss the tools that make visual merchandising of your cosmetic products and other health and beauty items easier. While the market offers different solutions of this sort, our team has experience with increasing online sales of a client’s eCommerce store after implementing Sortler, a cloud-based system with access to a flexible virtual catalog. Let’s dig deeper to explain to you what we’re talking about.
What is Sortler?
To take full advantage of Sortler, you need to sign up for a monthly or annual subscription, choosing the option that suits you from the offered tariff plans, and go through a simple registration. After this, you’re welcome to work with a virtual catalog and synchronize it with a real one whenever you want.
You can use Sortler in 3 ways:
- Smart rules. The name speaks for itself, as that’s the smartest way to manage your online catalog. You just create special rules describing how you want your product display to look, and Sortler will follow them, moving items up and down the catalog page according to the specified conditions.
- Scores. The second option to use Sortler is to assign specific scores to products: the higher the score, the more visible the item will be on the page.
- Drag & Drop. And finally, there is the most visual way to work with the online catalog. In this case, you manually move products through the catalog and immediately see what is happening on the page.
What makes Sortler an effective cosmetics merchandising tool? What can you do with its help? Let’s list the main options:
- Greater variety of products on the page. If face creams dominate your page while the customer is interested in shower gels, there is a risk of losing a potential buyer. To avoid this problem, you should create a special sorting rule that specifies each product category’s percentage in the catalog’s visible area. Don’t force the customer to do extra work to find the desired health or beauty item!
- Customer-engaging product combinations. Using Sortler’s features, you can automatically create eye-catching combinations of products that match each other in one way or another (as in the previously given example of mascara and eye shadow). By placing them side by side on the catalog page, you encourage customers to buy two items instead of just one, which means more upselling opportunities.
- Product display according to season. Of course, health and beauty e-commerce stores are less dependent on the time of year than, say, fashion shops, but there is still a certain relationship with the change of seasons. For example, in summer, you can place various tanning items in a visible area, and when the cold weather sets in, move winter creams, etc., higher up. Moreover, if you create the appropriate rules, Sortler will do all this without your participation.
- Automated warehouse management. Sortler automates the placement of products on the catalog, taking into account their availability in the warehouse. The tool will move the out-of-stock goods down the page, thereby eliminating the situation when the customer adds unavailable items to the shopping cart.
- Improving sales of individual items. If a certain product is selling poorly, you can try to fix things with the help of Sortler. The action plan is simple:
- Track items with low sales rates and make them more visible on the page. Thus, you attract consumers’ attention to them and increase the chances of purchase.
- Indicate the period during which you give low-selling goods a chance to start bringing you profit.
- If the situation hasn’t improved after the deadline, Sortler assigns a specified discount to these products.
That’s only part of the features Sortler offers for health and beauty product catalog optimization. Learn more about how this tool can help you meet your visual merchandising challenges here.Do you have any questions left? We’re happy to answer them and advise you on the most effective approach to eCommerce development and promotion.
