Cosmetics e-store on Magento – Is it a Good Idea?

Are you looking to launch your own cosmetics e-commerce? Wondering which platform to choose for your shop? There are plenty of options. But since you’ve landed on our blog, one of the solutions you might be considering is a cosmetics e-store on Magento. And that’s a great choice. Magento is one of the most efficient and flexible e-commerce engines. In this article, we’ll prove to you that it is an excellent option for the beauty industry.

A Cosmetics Store on Magento Is Not for Everyone

Brands like Super-Pharm, Rituals, Semilac, Laneige, and Caudalie use Magento. You’ve probably heard of most of them since each of these companies is among the leading cosmetics out there. So, if top players in the beauty industry use this engine, implementing Magento for your business might work well too. It might… but it doesn’t have to.

Firstly, because a Magento store is a significant investment. To launch e-commerce on this platform, you must hire developers. Whether you do this internally or use a software house, you’ll need to pay for the developers’ work. And the price can be quite high. The cost of setting up a store on Magento starts around 20,000 EUR. So, it’s not an expense that everyone can afford.

Secondly, because Magento is an advanced technology that offers enormous possibilities, but… not every company that sellicosmetics needs such a complex solution. Especially not at the very start of their business. If yourcatalog includes a dozen or maybe a few dozen products, particularly simple ones, Magento might be “too powerful” for you. This is especially true if you sell only in your country and exclusively through your online store. In such cases, the advanced functionalities that Magento offers won’t be necessary for you. And if you’re not going to use even half of this engine’s capabilities, there’s no point in overpaying.

Customers Are Picky When Buying Cosmetics

And not just about the product offering. Modern consumers looking for cosmetics online expect that the e-shop they visit will meet their needs. These needs are not just about the quality of the products themselves (which are, of course, very important), their availability, or price, but also the experience provided by the platform they visit. And these, as you might guess, must be at the highest possible level.

A store that looks like it was created in 2000 will have sales similar to a cosmetics stall where your grandpa was buying a grey soap. You might scrape by till the end of the month, but you probably wouldn’t call that a spectacular success.

It’s undeniable that we often buy cosmetics based on appearance. An attractive lipstick color or eye-catching packaging matters in this industry. It also matters how your online store looks. Consumers expect a cosmetics e-commerce site to look good because we want to look good when buying beauty products. Therefore, when implementing your own sales platform, you must consider this. The design of your e-shop matters (and not just for cosmetics stores).

However, appearance isn’t everything 😉. Your e-commerce must meet your customers’ expectations not only visually but also (and perhaps even more importantly) technologically. Major beauty companies like Sephora, L’Oreal Paris, and Charlotte Tilbury have taken cosmetics e-commerce to a whole new level. Advanced filtering, AR fitting rooms, or AI assistants — these are the standards we’ve become accustomed to by the biggest players in this industry. Although it’s not entirely fair because not everyone can afford such innovative solutions, today’s e-consumer now expects to encounter similar experiences in every cosmetics store. Your sales platform cannot fall too far behind. You need to ensure that its technological layer is at the highest level you can afford.

Not every e-commerce engine allows the implementation of such modern solutions. And you need to remember this when choosing a platform for your online store.

Will Magento meet the expectations of today’s e-consumer? Absolutely. But we’ll tell you more about that in the rest of this article.

Why is Magento a Great Solution for the Beauty Industry?

Because it offers cosmetics e-stores tremendous possibilities.

High Performance  

Magento is a very stable platform capable of handling e-commerce with even hundreds of thousands of products. With proper implementation and a good server, it can manage heavy traffic and many advanced functionalities without breaking a sweat.

Extensive Customization Capabilities

Magento is an open-source engine. This means that by implementing your store on this technology, you have access to its source code, which you can modify as you see fit. This way, you can create an e-Commerce platform perfectly tailored to your needs. But this is not the only feature that makes this engine an extremely flexible solution.

Magento has a modular architecture. Simply put, you have some base and you can add additional blocks or modules to it. You can attach and detach these modules as needed. This allows you not only to create a platform tailored to your needs but also to test different solutions to make your e-store even better.

Advanced SEO  

Organic search traffic is a very important element of online business. However, to attract such traffic, you must optimize your cosmetics online store for search engines. Just stuffing product descriptions with a bunch of keywords is not enough. SEO also involves technical actions on the site. Magento offers a lot of possibilities in this regard, allowing you to achieve a high position on Google and attract decent organic traffic to your e-Commerce site.

Easy Content Management

It’s undeniable that an online beauty store usually has quite a lot of content (and we’re not just talking about the blog section). The sales platform has many product and category descriptions, graphics, and banners on the homepage, “about us” content, and information about deliveries and payments. And it’s not like you write and set these things up once, and they’ll be relevant for years. It’s not that simple (and boring). Content in an online store changes, and it should change quite frequently. While you might not update a product description every week, you’re likely to change a banner on the homepage regularly. And that’s why an easy-to-use admin panel where you can make such changes is very important.

In the case of a custom store, each such change would have to go through your IT department. In Magento, you or your content team can do it yourself, and quite quickly too. This way, any marketing campaigns can appear in your online store as needed, descriptions can be optimized for SEO whenever necessary, and products on the homepage can change right after a price cut.

Easier Business Growth

As you might guess, the modular architecture of Magento provides vast opportunities for developing your sales platform. However, this engine has one very important feature that makes growing your business even easier. It’s called Multistore.

With it, you can create one store for the Polish market, another for the German market, and a third for South America. Each of them can be in a different language, handle a different currency, and even have a separate product offering. Interestingly, you can manage all of this from a single admin panel.

Moreover, with Magento Multistore, creating each additional store is easier, faster, and cheaper than implementing each one of them from scratch.

Sounds like a pretty good way to expand your business abroad.

Detailed Sales Data

Every e-Commerce platform gives you some sales data. Some provide quite decent analytical tools, while others offer only basic dashboards. Magento is among the former. In this platform’s admin panel, you can view and export reports from any time range you want and check sales summaries, including the number of orders, their value, delivery method, or invoice status. In Magento, you can also generate product reports, such as those with the most frequently purchased products.

These extensive data capabilities will allow you to analyze your offering and sales in detail, enabling you to optimize your cosmetics business efficiently and improve your profitability month by month.

B2C and B2B in One Place  

Earlier, when discussing business growth, we mentioned that Magento, thanks to its Multistore feature, allows you to implement multiple e-shops on a single instance. This functionality, however, offers much more than just easier international expansion.

Thanks to Magento Multistore, you can manage your e-drugstore from the same admin panel as your digital cosmetics wholesale store. This way, not only will you implement the second store faster and cheaper, but you’ll also manage your entire business more easily. After all, your data will be in one place.

Many Integration Options  

If you have good developers on your team, you can integrate your Magento store with any external tool your business needs. ERP, BI, WMS, PIM, HotJar, Getresponse, Brand24, Hootsuite… whatever you wish.

The best part is that you’ll find ready-made plugins on the Internet for popular IT systems. Sometimes they are free, sometimes paid, but if they are made by the external tool’s manufacturer, they are usually good.

And as you might guess, if you have a ready-made plugin for your marketing automation tool, you’ll integrate it with your cosmetic e-shop faster and, most importantly, cheaper. Of course, the world won’t collapse if such a ready-made module doesn’t exist. Magento is open-source. Your developers can write such an integration from scratch. It might take some time and cost more than a ready-made plugin, but the option is there. So there’s no need to despair.

Magento offers quite a few possibilities for companies selling beauty products. It also provides plenty for their customers…

Functionalities You Can Implement with Magento 

We’ve already mentioned the enormous customization possibilities offered by this open-source engine. On Magento, you can implement really advanced features. However, this doesn’t mean that your e-drugstore must have complex configurators, access to corporate accounts, and even an AI assistant. Such advanced functionalities are solutions for the wealthy. Your online store doesn’t have to have them if your customers don’t need them. However, if the opposite is true, the technology you implement your store on must allow you to implement those solutions.

So, what features useful in the beauty industry can you have in your Magento e-Commerce with cosmetics?

Intuitive Filtering

Cosmetics are a rather specific category of products. Each item has many attributes that distinguish it from others. Take a face cream, for example. It can be moisturizing or anti-wrinkle, suitable for oily or dry skin, and it can contain hyaluronic acid or squalane. There can be many variations. If your product catalog includes more than one moisturizing cream, finding the product that best meets your customer’s needs can be difficult (and certainly time-consuming). Therefore, one of the most important functionalities of an online beauty store is product filtering.

Fortunately, Magento has quite good capabilities in this area. On this engine, you can create really nice filtering. Look at Clarena’s B2B store. You can filter products by cosmetic line, packaging type, active ingredient, or effect it gives. What’s best is that these filters can be combined, allowing a customer to quickly and conveniently find exactly the product they are looking for.

Good Search Bar

Filtering alone, however, is not enough. Sometimes your customer is looking for a very specific product, sometimes they know the parameters of the cosmetic they want to buy but don’t want to check boxes in the filtering menu—they prefer to type it into the search engine. And here comes another essential functionality for EVERY store, without exception—a search bar.

However, it cannot be just any search bar. The “magnifying glass” field in a modern e-drugstore should allow users to quickly and easily find a specific cosmetic. There are several ways to do this, including phrase suggestions, sorting search results by a selected attribute, or filtering suggested results. The more daring might also consider implementing AI solutions that better tailor search results to a specific user.

And all this, you can certainly implement on Magento. A big plus is that on this engine’s marketplace, you’ll find plenty of ready-made plugins that will allow you to implement a really great search bar in your store much faster (and probably cheaper 😉). And if none of the ready-made options suit you, you can write your own search engine from scratch. After all, Magento is an open-source engine, which gives huge possibilities.

Virtual Categories

Sounds mysterious… It’s clear that an online cosmetics store, or any store for that matter, should have a category tree through which customers can narrow down their searches. This is another element of the sales platform that helps users find the product best suited to them. But what are these mysterious VIRTUAL categories?

The best way to explain this is with a specific example. Imagine that a user goes to Google and types “matte red lipstick” into the search box. The results will likely show many pages that have such products. Let’s say they click on your link that directs them to a page. But which one? A specific product page? It’s not a great idea. This way you’re losing potential sales of other red matt lipsticks. The general “lipsticks” category? Then they must go through all the products in it to find those available in red and matte. But what if you showed them a “matte red lipsticks” category, where they could find all the products in your offer with these attributes? However, if your category tree had a separate category for each color and finish of lipstick, it would look like a weeping willow. With an emphasis on weeping. After all, your categories could likely be counted in thousands. Who would find their way in all this? Probably no one.

This is where virtual categories come in handy, which you create based on popular searches but do not link in your category tree.

This solution has two important advantages. First, it works great for SEO. With virtual categories, you can significantly increase the number of keywords your e-drugstore is positioned for. Second, you maintain simplicity and order in your category tree, allowing your customers to navigate your website more easily.

Virtual categories are a feature you can conveniently implement on Magento. Just install the ElasticSuite extension and define virtual categories based on rules. This way, you’ll create a group of products that includes all red lipsticks with a matte finish. Your customer will quickly find what they’re looking for, and you’ll benefit from additional phrases on Google.

Product Variants  

When selling cosmetics (especially colorful ones), it often happens that one product has several variants. Let’s take the mentioned lipstick as an example. In this case, one cosmetic can have many colors. If each color is a separate product in your store, not only will you make it harder for your customers to find the right lipstick, but you’ll also complicate the lives of your employees, who will have to manage each product individually.

The product variants functionality, which you can easily implement in your Magento store, comes to the rescue. When you implement it, your customers will find all variants of a given cosmetic on one product page. In the case of lipstick, these will be colors that the user can switch between, allowing them to quickly compare available options. In the case of perfumes, the variants could be bottle sizes. If your products have well-assigned attributes, you can easily set up it variants in your Magento admin panel.

Wishlist  

This is a functionality without which it’s hard to imagine an e-drugstore. Why? Because cosmetics are the type of product we like to compare, test, and buy on sale. Very often, before making a final purchase, we want to save them somewhere. And a great way to do this is a wishlist.

Such a wishlist can be created in many ways. Some stores treat the wishlist as a place where the user finds all the products they have saved. Others enhance this functionality by allowing users to group saved cosmetics or share such a wishlist with others.

You can implement a basic wishlist using Magento’s native feature. But don’t worry. You can also create more complex solutions in this technology, but you’ll need to invest a few dollars in purchasing the appropriate module.

Customer Reviews

This is another feature e-consumers expect from every online drugstore. It’s undeniable that cosmetics are quite “sensitive” products. In their case, quality is much more important than price. After all, when buying a cream, we want to know if it really works, whether it causes a tightening effect, or allergic reactions. However, it’s known that the product description will highlight only its advantages. Therefore, the reviews feature is very useful from the customer’s point of view. It’s in these reviews that we read the opinions of people who have used the product. And as we know, we trust online reviews more than the stores themselves.

You can easily add reviews to your Magento store. Just integrate your platform with a dedicated system like Zaufane.pl. And it’s done! Your store now has a customer reviews section. And don’t worry that reviews in your store will bring you more work. With tools like Zaufane.pl, you can easily automate the process of obtaining reviews and publishing them, saving you a lot of time. However, remember the legal aspects of the reviews published in your store. Due to the EU’s Omnibus Directive, you have some obligations in this regard, which are closely monitored.

Product Recommendations

…or good old cross-selling.

In traditional sales (offline), it’s like this: at the checkout or at the end of trade negotiations, the seller offers the customer another product. This is a typical move aimed at increasing the value of the receipt or invoice. And it works. If it didn’t, chain stores would have given up on offering additional products at the checkout a long time ago. However, they haven’t. Some companies make quite good money from their cross-selling strategies.

It might seem that it would be difficult to transfer such an action online. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can easily add a section with recommended products to an online store built on Magento. Moreover, you can do it better than in a physical store by tailoring the product to the customer. Just add a recommendation module to your e-store, configure its rules accordingly, and you’re done. A customer who adds an anti-frizz shampoo to their cart will get a suggestion to buy a conditioner from the same series.

Cosmetologist Consultations

As we mentioned earlier, beauty products fall into the category of “sensitive” items. Since we apply them on our bodies, we want them to work as well as possible and not harm us. However, everyone is different. They have different hair, different skin, different bodies. So choosing the best product for us is not an easy task. Especially since there are many different types of cosmetics on the market. The support of a specialist who knows the needs of skin and hair is worth its weight in gold. In a physical store, it’s simple. You train your employees well, and they advise your customers. The consumer feels taken care of and gets the impression (hopefully a true one) that they made a good choice.

But can such an experience be successfully transferred to the Internet? Absolutely. Just hire a few cosmetologists who will advise users of your store via chat.

And this isn’t complicated at all. Implementing chat on Magento is very simple. You integrate it with a tool like Live Chat, Help Scout, or Zendesk, and it’s done! And since most of these systems provide ready-made plugins for the most popular e-Commerce platforms, the integration process is very fast.

Virtual Fitting Rooms

This is one of those features that will give your e-drugstore a WOW effect. A big advantage of traditional cosmetics stores is that you can test a lipstick or eyeshadow on yourself before buying the product. So, you can check if burgundy suits you or not. Your purchasing decisions are much more accurate because of this. It’s not so easy online. We don’t have a way to test the product on ourselves, unless… the e-drugstore we visit has a virtual fitting room feature.

A great example of such functionality is L’Oreal Paris. On the website of this popular cosmetics brand, you’ll find digital fitting rooms that allow you to virtually try on “colored” products (lipsticks, mascaras, hair dyes, face foundations). All you have to do is give permission to use your phone’s camera as a digital mirror or upload your photo. And voila! You can test products on yourself without leaving the house.

However, a virtual fitting room is a fairly advanced functionality. Not every e-Commerce engine can handle it. But don’t worry. Magento 2 can easily do this task. Unfortunately, there aren’t many ready-made solutions of this class on the market yet. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any at all. Some can definitely be found. However, their quality varies. So, it may turn out that you’ll have to write your virtual fitting room from scratch. It will take some time and cost a bit, but it doesn’t change the fact that you can implement such a feature without major obstacles in your Magento store.

Conclusion

As you can see, you can create quite a decent e-drugstore on Magento. The high performance of this technology and its extensive customization options make it an ideal solution for the demanding beauty industry. Most importantly, Magento 2 is an engine that will allow your e-commerce to grow smoothly. Whether you plan to expand your product catalog or start selling abroad, Magento will meet your expectations. You must be aware that implementing an e-drugstore on this engine will cost you quite a bit. However, remember that creating an online store is an investment. If you put your money in low-quality stocks at the beginning, you will achieve poor results. But if you allocate your capital wisely and choose a solid engine that will enable the development of your e-business, your investment will pay off. And with interest.