ModelCo, the Australian cosmetics brand is stealing a march on rivals in e-commerce. Seeing a gap in the online shopping space for beauty brands, ModelCo relaunched its website in May 2013 and one year on has doubled online sales and experienced a 215% increase in unique visits to the site.
The unique visits rose from 88,200 between May 2012 – 2013 to 267,200 from May 2013 – 2014. Founder and CEO Shelley Barrett believes this rise came because there was a gap in the market when it comes to buying beauty products online.
“Many large fashion retailers were already playing in the 'content meets e-commerce' realm but no one in Australia was doing the same in beauty,” she said.
“What we have created, is a site that provides customers with informed and articulate content that helps to educate and inspire their purchasing decisions, as well as an efficient and easy to use e-commerce site.”
Not only has there been a rise in traffic the number of online transactions has doubled in the past year.
“Selling cosmetics and tanning online is difficult as there's not the same 'buy and try' philosophy that fashion retailers have,” Barrett said. “Customers need to know as much about the product that they're buying as possible so it was our job to create a site that delivers on that.”
In March of last year the brand also expanded into over 1000 Woolworths stores across Australia after noticing that its customers weren't responding to exclusivity any more.
The brand is scoping out online innovations such as technology that lets customers test colours before they buy to grow its authority in the e-commerce space.
“We don't want to copy other e-tailers, we want to be the first to do something. Which is why we launched a content facing e-commerce store. It was a first in beauty in Australia, to our knowledge,” said Barrett.
“The change in customer's shopping habits has affected retail worldwide and this was part of decision to partner with Woolworths. When Woolworths approached us, we realised that engaging with a national retailer opened up our distribution to customers who wanted convenience, but still liked to shop in store.”
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