According to eMarketer, health and beauty was Amazon’s third-fastest growing category in 2019, with sales totalling 44% of all online health and beauty sales in the USA. With more consumers turning to online marketplaces to purchase their beauty essentials, could selling beauty on Amazon help to drive incremental sales for your brand?
Based on the results of our research on the best practice Amazon customer experience provided by 100 consumer brands, we found that the Beauty category in particular scored very poorly, with eight of the 10 beauty brands that we reviewed placing in the bottom 20 brands overall.
Drawing on the results from this report, we’ve provided our tips for selling beauty on Amazon.
Get the basics right
Beauty products are notoriously tricky to purchase online, therefore including lifestyle imagery or videos on product listings can help to build consumer confidence in what they are buying. Likewise, adding simple text to secondary images, pointing out key ingredients or brand pedigree is beneficial.
While this sounds simple to achieve, less than half of the brands we reviewed used close-up images on all three of their top listings that we reviewed, and only 10% included lifestyle photographs as part of their image stacks.
Albeit not relevant for every product, many brands in this category could benefit from adding product variations showcasing different shades or product sizes on single listings. Keeping similar products rooted under parent ASINs to enable browsing of product variations is considered best practice when selling beauty on Amazon, helping to make product discovery easier for customers.
Selling beauty on Amazon: Align your brand presence
While beauty brands generally invest time and money in the presentation of their brand online, Amazon appears to be the one sales channel that they are not yet fully utilising to highlight their brand and product messaging.
Enhanced brand content allows brands to educate customers about product benefits and attributes, to help make a stronger first impression. However, we found for those selling beauty on Amazon, brand content was limited.
Only 10% linked to a branded storefront, and only 20% included A+ content to all their listings. Offering A+ content and a branded storefront allows brands to align their Amazon brand collateral and presence with that of other sales channels.
Take control of your brand
Competition is fierce on Amazon, and if your brand is not being sold on Amazon by yourselves, it will be by other third-party sellers. Resellers in the Beauty category can vary in terms of pricing, packaging, and delivery costs and times; which can be damaging to your brand reputation, and generate negative feedback for your products.
When analysing the average number of resellers on bestselling listings, 50% of brands in the Beauty category, had 6 or more sellers listed. For this reason, it is vital beauty brands seek to build on a defence strategy via Amazon – to attempt to take back control over their brand.
Although brands in the Beauty category do well at dominating the search results on their brand term, we found that the top search results for their brand term are often occupied by listings where a third-party seller is winning the buy box. To our surprise, only 10% of beauty brands reviewed had Amazon winning the Buy Box for their bestselling listings.
As one of the largest Amazon sellers globally, we hope to remind brands who are selling beauty on Amazon that the responsibility falls on them to ensure their presence on the marketplace delivers a great customer experience.
Download the full report here to find out if your brand was one of the 100 consumer brands scored as part of our research.
For more insights into the beauty category on Amazon or to hear more about our Amazon Seller model, please contact us at UK@Pattern.com