The $280 billion-dollar market and growing, with the Cosmetics segment alone garnering up to hundreds of billions in global revenue each year, the sector for beauty and personal care products is an ever-booming one.
Digital retail has a high enough bar for demand, consumer requirements, and niche competition, but selling beauty products online requires even more customer impact, practical, aesthetic, and otherwise.
This is exactly why WEZOM was approached by the international beauty retail brand as a competent and competitive software services provider. We had the pleasure of setting up a whole new eCommerce development project and would love to share the results with you!
Who Was the Client?
Kimito is a Korean beauty retail brand selling Korean make-up, self-care, and various cosmetics products in Ukraine.
The global digital beauty retail market is characterized by an undying, highly active consumer demand and a constant need for new, inviting store designs.
Kimito needed the new design in order to cover that type of demand across specific demographics. With a particular focus on providing services in Ukraine, Kimito required an efficient way to source unique Korean beauty products for Ukrainian consumers.
Ultimately, Kimito’s vision called for a cozy new online shopping outlet, which set us up for a new project with very particular goals and objectives.
What Were the Goals?
With the main task in hand pretty clear, we had to plan further project workflow based on the client’s top priority - Start selling a range of Korean cosmetics products to a target audience of Ukrainian consumers
This breaks down into the following technical tasks:
- Come up with a new eCommerce store design
- Develop a fitting new backend to power that design
- Integrate accounting tools and a CRM system
- Implement a new convenient product catalog
All in all, we needed to plan out and design, develop and set up, and integrate and launch a brand new online beauty store, and do it at the highest competitive level possible.
Beauty eCommerce Trends: Implemented Examples
WEZOM’s team of UX/UI designers, frontend/backend developers, DevOps specialists, and QAs gathered to assemble a new digital store from scratch. To make it up to today’s standard and competitive, before all else we conducted thorough research of the latest market trends, competitor solutions, and consumer desires.
The results of the study had projected the following essentials, which we implemented according to respective trends.
Mobile-friendly beauty store platform
Today’s eCommerce relies heavily on solutions that are mobile-first and mobile-friendly, with mobile commerce covering over 60% of the whole market. This knowledge initially drove us to design a store that runs perfectly on mobile devices as well as in desktop browsers.
For this, we needed to:
- Use a mobile-first approach, with further scaling to desktop
- Implement a responsive design with fluid layouts & flexible grids
- Optimize navigation & layout for touchscreens
- Integrate mobile-specific features (native & custom ones)
- Ensure cross-browser compatibility
Compelling, audience-targeted content
Kimito is a specialized provider offering high-quality consumer and professional cosmetics and personal care products. And it has a lot of extra and related materials, like tutorials, study reports, articles, interviews, etc., to back up its authenticity and reputability. Which is why we implemented a separate beauty blog section packing a range of additional content.
We needed to:
- Implement a logical content segment structure
- Categorize & tag content
- Format content & optimize it for mobile reading
- Link blog content to relevant products
AI personalized beauty offerings
Beauty and self-care products can be very personal and difficult to pick remotely. So the project’s second big priority after going mobile-first was to achieve smart personalization. In general, personalization is a powerful sales booster, which over 90% of recently surveyed marketers eagerly approve.
We enabled smart personalization opportunities by integrating Kimi, Kimito’s AI-powered beauty product selection assistant for the store’s users.
(Hey, I’m Kimi. I will gladly help pick cosmetics for you. Let’s find out a few things about you first…)
Kimi helps customers find exactly what they need on the Kimito website by getting to know them via a short six-question questionnaire. Kimi then offers a range of available products that perfectly fit a specific skin type and preferences based on a smart analysis (and can be bought right away in one click).
In order to set up Kimi, we needed to:
- Integrate the AI model with the store’s product database
- Test & calibrate various AI responses & recommendations
- Personalize & make sure the AI can filter products based on user queries
- Integrate Kimi with the one-click sales functionality
Social proof on product pages
The only thing that motivates a potential customer to make a purchase more than the store’s ads and reputation is the recommendation of a fellow customer. So giving a good, visible space to real-life testimonials and customer reviews was yet another priority. For this, we integrated a social proof section right next to the product description on each product’s page.
We also added a smart products rating system. All in all, the social proof functionality required us to:
- Implement a system for accepting customer reviews & ratings
- Enable smart review sorting (based on date, size, rating, etc.)
- Add a separate space for testimonials on each product page
Loyalty programs that win customers
Our last but not least important general priority was to integrate the incentives strategy that Kimito had with the new online store’s functionality, in the form of a personalized loyalty program.
The result is Kimito’s custom cashback program, where registered customers get a 5% bonus cashback from each purchase. In order to get the cashback, all you need to do is:
- Register a Kimito website account
- Make a purchase via the website’s shopping cart
A customer just needs to make sure they stay authorized while completing a purchase, they will then see an updated cashback bonus amount in their user cabinet on the website.
Registered customers get 5% bonus cashback from the total amount of payment for the purchase (i.e., whole cart payment). Note also that the cashback bonus doesn’t work for 1-click purchases and purchases made via the manager.
Other tech implementations & integrations
On top of all the above, Kimito’s project involved lots of secondary and technical work to finish and launch. Namely, there were certain systems and tools that we needed to connect. Then, there were also testing and Quality Assurance tasks, which took separate effort.
Not to bother you with too much detail, what we also did was:
- Connecting a RetailCRM system
- Integrating an accounting system
- Integrating payment gateways
- Integrating an analytics engine
- Integrating a Kimi AI model
- Doing SEO research & optimization
- Conducting manual/automated testing scenarios
- Conducting QA sessions
- Providing reports & guidelines
- Post-launch support & bug-fixing
Tech Stack and the Development Team
Stack:
- PHP
- Node.js
- Laravel
- HTML/CSS
- MySQL
- PWA
- Alpine.js
- livewire
- Redis
Team:
- UX Designer
- UX/UI Designer
- Frontend Developer
- Backend Developer
- DevOps
- QA Engineer
Results of The Project
We finished Kimito’s end-to-end online store development in exactly four months’ time — 125 days, to be ultimately precise.🙂 This was a full-cycle, turnkey project with backend to frontend development, integration of advanced smart features, testing, launch, optimization, and lots of more auxiliary work.
The result is a convenient and feature-rich yet to-the-point and aesthetic website where you can easily shop for unique Korean beauty products selected just for your skin type or other personal preferences and traits.
The bigger result still, however, is the store’s boosted business metrics. In just three months of operation, the new Kimito store achieved:
- 3x growth in user traffic
- 0,9% to 2,4% conversion rates growth
- 30% more loyal customers
- 15% more expensive average check
Freshened up Kimito also got more feedback gathered in months than the former store managed to gather in years. The project was on time and budget — we consider it a definite success.
FAQ
What are the specifics of this case’s client?
The Korean beauty market is very extensive, rich in offer, and filled with demand. One of the largest-scale industries locally, in part due to Korea’s generally unique and proactive attitude towards beauty and personal aesthetics, the Korean beauty and personal care products segment is global and extremely popular. Retail providers that choose to specialize in Korean makeup sales face huge competition on one side and continuous demand on the other. This is why Kimito was quick to update and maximize its offer with the help of a new feature-rich online retail platform.
What was the project’s overall timeline?
It took us 4 months to implement a new, fresh eCommerce beauty store design from the ground up, no more, no less. This project timeline entailed the full creation of the store up until its public launch. After that, we were also providing post-launch tech support, handling any issues and bumps appearing in active operation with live users.
How big was the team and overall project scope?
Kimito’s online store design and implementation was a technically innovative project that took a slightly higher than medium scope of workflow time, effort, and challenge. It took two designers, two developers, one DevOps expert, and a Quality Assurance engineer to complete the project team. They were dedicated interchangeably over the months of project completion.