As the beauty market realise the shifting consumer trend in current market; the change from physical outlets to online platforms is now a reality. A beauty and cosmetics centric study by A.T. Kearney reveals that beauty brands are now adapting to digital market for its significant share of supply demand. Tarte, for example, a beauty line found in one bedroom apartment grossed at $12M in just 5 years of joining Sephora. Cosmetic companies like L’Oreal also reports that 75% of online sales are coming from partnering e-shops while the rest from its own brand site. Interestingly, the study finds best deals offered online as one of the main motivator for increasing online purchases. Almost 95% of online beauty shoppers find it important to lookout for best prices before making a purchase.
Beauty Startups Go Digital
The emerging beauty market trend encourages new beauty and cosmetics brands choosing to work with e-commerce platforms like e-shops and online savings platforms to boost their sales. Just like Fenty Beauty by Rihanna that chose Sephora as exclusive partner; home grown beauty lines such as Dida, Madu Cosmetics and So.Lek also making their business online by joining Malaysia’s beauty e-commerce platforms such as FashionValet, Lazada and Shins and Sephora.
Having over 500 thousand estimated visits, Sephora is clearly the most favourable beauty platform among Malaysians in comparison to other online beauty retailers; FashionValet, Lazada and Shins, CupoNation – the discount hunter’s main destination – decided to study the usage of discount codes for Sephora. This study identifies the portrait of savvy consumer who actively makes Sephora purchases, ranging from demographics, age and gender to the type of devices and browsers used.
Who are Sephora’s smart discount hunting shoppers?
The Ringgit friendly population of Sephora is indeed lead by the female buyers compared to the male buyers with a percentage for females (89.48%) and for males (10.52%). When it comes to the age of the users, we have broken it down into 4 categories and we found out that generation-Y users between 18-24 years (46.3%) and 25-34 years (44.6%) are by far the most active deal hunters, followed by users between the ages of 35-44 years (7%) and last but not least ages of 45-54 years (2.1%). This is an obvious sign that Millennials, the Internet generation are the biggest users choosing to shop smart online. According to the study Decoding Malaysian digital DNA by EY, Gen-Y is the highest population who are digitally savvy while 83% of Malaysians agree that they will research online about a product before purchase and 59% choose to do the same while in the store or at the point of making a purchase. Surprisingly, Gen-Y is identified to spend the least on digital expenses compared to Gen-X and baby boomers who are recognised to be the key spenders. The finding relates to Sephora savvy shoppers ideally made of gen-Y shopaholics widely looking out for saving deals online for beauty products. This category of individuals in general usually comprise of school leavers, college students or newly working adults on tight budgets widely looking out for saving deals online.
How do deal hunters shop on Sephora?
The numbers show that mobile is predominant for e-shopping (57.35%), followed by desktop (40.21%) and tablet (2.44%). Users browsing from desktop use mostly Google Chrome (52.25%), Safari (41.95%), and Firefox (3.55%), While the remainder of the distribution (2.55%) goes to other browsers including Internet Explorer, Edge, and Opera.
The mobile distribution is led by Apple, where the consumers choose to browse with Iphones and iPads (68.9%) and Samsung (15.02%). Which makes it over 4 times more users from Apple than Samsung. The rest of the distribution goes to other brands like HuaWei, OPPO, Asus, and etc.
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