Mobile has evolved into an important channel for e-commerce retailers. Mobile used to be simply a channel for shoppers to find information about products, brands and compare prices. Those days are long gone. Mobile today is a serious contender as a purchase channel for e-commerce shoppers, as highlighted by the UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper - study.
The transformation of mobile to a real, formidable purchase channel is significant and has great implications for retailers, especially retailers looking to sell skincare and beauty products online.
In a pure desktop-first environment, retailers can get away by not offering consumers with ways to help guide them to a purchase and not offering consumers with assistance in discovering products.
On mobile, where screen sizes are small and attention is scarce, this is no longer an option. The importance in helping the consumer find a product, choose a product and direct them towards buying a product plays a critical role in ensuring the customer experience in mobile meets consumer expectations.
For the beauty-category, advances in technology help retailers position themselves as a preferred retailer for mobile shoppers. Technologies like computer-vision can be leveraged to provide the e-commerce beauty shopper with an individualized customer experience and guide the shopper towards a purchase.
In fact, individual brands have already discovered this. L'Oreal's Makeup Genius is a good example of a brand leading the way in offering a truly individual experience for the shopper on mobile. The success of L'Oreal in this initiative clearly displays shoppers' thirst for solutions that help them understand not only which products they should be using but also why they should be using them.
For retailers, being able to explain to shoppers on mobile devices why they should purchase a particular beauty or skincare product is not a question of if it should be done, but rather will become a necessary element in driving the success of the retailers mobile commerce strategy.
To uncover how you can leverage technology to drive your beauty-buyers towards a purchase on mobile, find out more about our Digital Skincare Advisor.
