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Storefronts That Still Convert.
Beauty is the most crowded category online, and the most brand-sensitive. A store that converts but looks cheap loses the customer for good. We refuse to trade one for the other.
Beauty is the most competitive category in consumer ecommerce and the most sensitive to how things look. A store can convert well and still damage the brand if it feels cheap, and a beautiful store that loses people at the checkout is an expensive gallery.
The economics are unforgiving in a specific way: paid acquisition usually costs more than the first order returns. That makes the second and third purchase the entire business model, which is why retention work is not an add-on in this category - it is the point.
Where Beauty Brands Lose Money.
Discounting becomes the only lever
When growth stalls, the reflex is another promotion. It works once, trains customers to wait for the next one, and erodes the margin that funded acquisition.
Reviews and proof are an afterthought
In a category where the product goes on someone’s skin, other people’s experience carries more weight than any claim the brand makes about itself.
The first order costs more than it earns
Paid acquisition in beauty is expensive and getting worse. If your economics only work on the second and third order, retention is not a nice-to-have - it is the entire business model.
The cart is where the brand work gets undone
Brands spend heavily on the look and then hand the checkout to a default template. Every extra step, surprise cost and confusing field is paid for in abandoned carts.
Nobody knows what to buy first
Skincare especially. A visitor who cannot tell which product is for them does not ask - they leave. Routine builders, honest guidance and clear sequencing sell more than another discount.
What We Build for Beauty Brands.
Reviews and social proof
Collecting reviews properly and presenting them where the doubt actually occurs, which is the product page rather than a testimonials section nobody visits.
Bundles and routine building
Helping a first-time buyer choose a set rather than a single item, which raises order value and improves the chance the product works for them.
Storefront design and build
Editorial-feeling stores with quick-add product cards, a slide-out bag and a checkout that gets out of the way. Brand-led, but measured on conversion.
Product education that sells
Routine builders, ingredient explainers, before-and-after structure and a journal that answers real questions instead of chasing keywords.
Email and retention
Welcome, abandoned browse, replenishment timing and win-back. The unglamorous work that decides whether your acquisition spend was worth it.
Paid social and creative
Campaigns built around creative that suits the platform, with landing experiences that continue the ad rather than contradicting it.
Subscription and replenishment
Where the product suits it, a subscription path that customers actually want - easy to pause, easy to skip, not a trap.
Built for This Sector.
ÉLAN Paris
A skincare and parfum maison built as a complete storefront - a rotating announcement bar, quick-add product cards, a slide-out bag and an editorial journal. It was designed to sell without shouting, which is the hardest brief in this category.
Demonstration build - the brand shown is illustrative, the design and development are ours. See our disclaimer.
Where We Would Begin.
With a store already trading, we start by measuring rather than redesigning. Where in the path from advert to confirmed order are people leaving, what does a first customer cost, and what share of revenue comes from repeat purchase. Those three numbers usually decide the whole plan.
If repeat purchase is weak, retention work comes before anything else, because acquiring more first-time customers at a loss simply scales the loss. If conversion is the weak point, the product page and checkout come first, and the traffic budget stays where it is until they improve.
Questions We Get in This Sector.
Can you help with wholesale or stockists?
Yes - a trade area with separate pricing and ordering can sit alongside the consumer store without confusing either audience.
Do you work with new brands or established ones?
Both, but the work differs. A new brand needs positioning and a store that earns trust. An established one usually needs conversion and retention work rather than a rebuild.
Can you handle regulated claims?
We will flag claims that look like they need substantiation, and we write around them where possible. Confirm specifics with your own regulatory advisor - we are not one.
What about subscriptions?
Worth it for genuinely replenishable products and counterproductive for everything else. A subscription customers resent cancelling costs more in chargebacks and goodwill than it earns.
Shopify, or something custom?
Shopify for most beauty brands, honestly. It handles payments, tax and fulfillment integrations that are expensive to rebuild, and we can design it so it does not look like a theme. We recommend custom only when you need something the platform genuinely cannot do.
Can you improve our existing store instead of rebuilding it?
Often yes, and it is usually the better first step. We audit the path from ad to checkout, fix what is leaking, and then decide together whether a rebuild is justified by what we found.
How do you reduce customer acquisition cost?
Usually not by changing the ads first. We look at conversion rate, average order value and repeat rate, because improving those makes the same ad spend go further. Then we work on the creative and targeting.
Do you handle product photography?
We art-direct it and tell you exactly what the site needs, but we do not shoot it. For beauty we will often specify a mix - clean pack shots for the grid, texture and in-use imagery for the story.
Let’s Talk About
Your Situation.
Tell us where you are getting stuck. We will tell you honestly what we would do first - even when that is smaller than you expected.
Book a Discovery Call →