Scale Your Ecommerce Beauty Brand Beyond Seven Figures With Headless Commerce

For scaling beauty ecommerce brands, standing out is no small feat. But you’ve got momentum with no signs of slowing down: 

At this stage, you’ve perfected your flagship products (and are working on releasing more) while making a splash in your niche—whether you’re the go-to magnetic eyelash brand for Gen Z, or you’ve amassed a cult-like following for your clean ingredient daily cleanser. 

Now you’re working with notable influencers on TikTok, and going all-in on multichannel selling.

Your beauty ecommerce brand is booming (your GMV is a strong seven figures) and you’ve come a long way since you started out. It’s an exciting time!

But to accelerate? To make it into beauty-brand all-star mode? The likes of The Ordinary, Glossier, and Drunk Elephant as newly minted, independent household names? For this, you need to level up your owned-ecommerce experience. Building brand equity and maturing from the days of endless click-to-install integrations.  

Fortunately, the time is right for beauty ecommerce brands to double down on growth potential…

The beauty space is set to grow even more

 In the last decade alone, the beauty industry has seen steady growth, with total US sales expected to surpass 90 billion by 2023. 

What’s more, over half of internet users in the US have already bought from a DTC beauty or personal care brand, with the other half saying they will likely purchase in the future. 

The best way to make your mark in this space is to convey quality—and that your products are worth their price point—via stunning site design and dynamic shopping features. This differentiation, with an elevated ecommerce experience, is the key to success in a saturated market.

It hasn’t always been easy for brands to create stunning and performant experiences. But these days, you can have your cake and eat it, too, thanks to headless commerce.

In this guide, we explore what headless is, why beauty ecommerce brands are leveraging this tech, how they’re doing it (especially now that you don’t need to construct a headless tech stack from scratch), and what this can mean for your businesses continued growth.

Skip ahead:

• What does it mean to take your beauty ecommerce brand headless?
• The benefits of making the switch
• Examples of headless beauty ecommerce sites
• The two most common ways to achieve a headless site

In a nutshell, headless commerce just means a brand uses separate tech to power the front and backend of their beauty brand’s ecommerce site to unlock flexibility and benefits like limitless design and unparalleled site speed. 

You basically no longer rely on an existing ecommerce platform for covering all aspects of shoppers’ experience (from frontend site design through to checkout). 

By separating what the customer sees (your frontend site content) from the backend functions (like compliance, checkout, payments, and sales), you gain more control over the design of the shopping experience. 

Headless commerce is often the next step for brands experiencing rapid growth or for multichannel, DTC beauty brands that have hit a glass ceiling with their custom theme and want more control. 

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Want to learn more about going headless, the easy way, with Shogun Frontend?<cta-title>See what’s possible. Learn more

If going headless means you’ll use different technology to power your site’s frontend layer ( separate from your Shopify or BigCommerce backend), why are innovative beauty brands taking the leap? Why not just create a new custom theme and call it a day? 

Here are five big reasons high-growth brands are turning to a longer-term solution and why you should consider it too:

Absolutely stunning ecommerce design capability

These days, shoppers can instantly discern a quality brand experience from one that’s mediocre or templated. In fact, almost 40% of customers say poor site design is the number one reason they’ll leave an ecommerce site. 

Plus, 61% of customers say that visuals are one of the most important elements of an online shopping experience. And when it comes to beauty ecommerce, rich visuals—like glossy product shots of an eye palette, regimen how-to videos from influencers, and contrasting before and after comparisons—are everything. 

If you’re coming up against the limits of a custom theme or have simply outgrown the design capability a traditional ecommerce platform can offer—then you’ll love the flexibility of designing your store’s frontend exactly as you want it. 

Once headless, you can easily add rich media and visuals throughout your site without worrying about platform constraints. Conveying quality, value, and luxury is finally possible without compromises or restrictive themes. 

Unparalleled site speed (for more conversions and improved SEO!)

A recent study on customer reactions to slow ecommerce sites confirms a correlation between a faster site and a positive change in the number of page views, conversion rate, and average order value. And this validates what we’ve known for years! 

The study reveals that when it comes to a slow ecommerce site, customers are primarily unlikely to make a purchase, followed by customers unlikely to return to that site:

This tells us that the faster your site’s performance and speed, the more your shoppers can explore your site in a single session, leading to a boost in your revenue. 

With headless commerce (and especially headless via progressive web app technology, or PWAs for short), beauty and skincare brands can offer a blazing-fast browsing experience no matter the device your customers are using to shop. 

This is especially important as mobile commerce continues to be a leading channel for ecommerce brands. It’s estimated that by 2025, mobile will account for 10% of all retail sales in the US, so for brands to stay competitive, focusing on mobile is a must. 

PWAs, in particular, offer unparalleled site speed because they pre-fetch and cache data right when customers land on the site. Unlike traditional sites that refresh entirely as customers navigate to different pages, PWAs load once and only once, eliminating lag time between page loads.

In fact, prestige skincare brand, TULA Skincare, increased their site speed by 35% after going headless with Shogun Frontend. We’ll dive more into TULA’s success later!

#cta-paragraph-fe#Not only is site speed important for customer experience, but it impacts your SEO ranking. Fast ecommerce sites = higher ranking in the SERP.

Improve your store’s capability for personalized shopping features

Similar to heavy design elements, shopping features like augmented reality, virtual try-on, and background video are only feasible on sites that can balance out their performance. 

With PWA technology and server-side rendering, your beauty store can better support these personalized shopping features and more, like high-resolution before and after imagery, micro-animations, custom scroll effects, and auto-remerchandising pages—without slowdowns. 

This face mapping tool using AI from skincare brand Dermalogica is a great example of the type of interaction that’s possible when your store is built on leading tech:

In this case, customers can use an AI feature built into the site to receive personalized product recommendations from Dermalogica. Adding a tool like this to a traditionally-built site could open up potential lags in performance. 

Futureproof your tech stack and approach to performance 

By transforming your beauty brand’s ecommerce site into a headless progressive web app, you future-proof your shopping experience and tech stack to grow with your sustained success. 

As your brand grows, you want an ecommerce experience that can withstand an increase in activity (like conversions and pageviews) without hiccups in performance, all while allowing your team to be agile with site updates and changes.

When you go headless with a frontend platform, for example, you ensure your migration is relevant for years as the entire store gets built on industry-leading React.js (as opposed to Liquid). 

Empower non-technical team members to impact revenue, faster

When you go headless, your team will often manage content in an entirely new content management system (CMS). And with merchant-focused platforms like Shogun Frontend, this means a visual experience manager with quick, codeless updates. 

Where your older, traditional beauty site might require six days (and seven bribes to your team's developers!) to get store content and promotions shipped, when you go headless with a lower-code platform, non-technical team members can make site-wide changes fast.

This removes workflow bottlenecks, and allows your dev team and non-technical team to work in tandem while staying on brand. You can finally get the design you want, no compromises, in a reasonable timeframe to impact revenue goals quickly. 

Many leading beauty ecommerce brands have already moved to headless commerce to support their impressive growth trajectory.

Let’s look at a few successful headless beauty brands and how this tech has impacted business for the better:

TULA Skincare

As TULA grew in popularity (and developed an almost cult-like following), they sought out an ecommerce solution that could not only withstand growth, but that mirrored their glowing reputation.

They turned to headless commerce via Shogun Frontend to begin their headless journey. TULA has seen great results since launching, notably:

• Site speed has increased by about 35%
• Page-to-page click-throughs is now five times faster 

What’s more, TULA now has total creative control over their site—meaning they can experiment with rich visuals and media to see what yields the best results (and with less reliance on developer resources via Shogun Frontend’s Experience Manager). 

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“It comes down to ROI and the bang for your buck. Choosing a unified platform like Shogun Frontend that does the heavy lifting for you on the server infrastructure, and is optimized for speed, is the way to go.”  — Ilan Levine, Head of Technology & Digital Product at TULA Skincare

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#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Get the scoop on TULA’s headless commerce journey<cta-title>Want more details? Check out the full case study. Read more‍

Victoria Beckham Beauty

The beauty ecommerce brand migrated to a headless setup to bring customers a sleek, app-like shopping experience.

Together with their Shopify backend and tools like Contentful and Amazon Cloudfront, Victoria Beckham Beauty offers customers an elegant yet lightning-fast ecommerce experience.

Lancôme

Another beauty giant, Lancôme, saw the benefits of headless technology and made the switch. Lancôme’s progressive web app—powered by Salesforce Commerce Cloud—is not only fast but can accommodate large volumes of traffic and activity without fail. 

After launching their PWA, the beauty brand saw some significant results: a 17% increase in conversions, a 53% increase in mobile sessions, and an 8% increase in conversion rates on recovered carts through push notifications (a feature available to PWAs). 

OneBlade

Luxury shave brand, OneBlade, wanted an ecommerce experience as smooth as a fresh shave. Being a visual brand, OneBlade moved to headless commerce via Shogun Frontend to make room for sleek background videos, high-resolution imagery, and rich merchandising. 

The brand launched their Shogun Frontend-powered site in early 2021 and has since seen results like:‍

• ‍579% increase in active refill subscriptions
• 30.1% increase in average order value
• 83% decrease in average page-to-page load time

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"After implementing Shogun Frontend, sales have shifted towards our higher-end razors, which confirms we’re now able to deliver high-converting, high-end user experiences. We're already seeing a year-over-year increase in average order value. No other changes we've made to our business have even come close to that kind of an impact in such a short period of time." — Josh Nash, Chief Marketing Officer at OneBlade

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#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Want to learn more about OneBlade’s experience with Shogun Frontend?<cta-title>Check out the full case study. Read more

If you think a flexible frontend solution could help your beauty or cosmetics brand level up to the next phase of growth—that’s great! But how do you get started? ‍

In terms of implementation, there are many ways to achieve a flexible, headless frontend. 

While this is largely a positive—in that there’s not one perfect way—brands are realizing some methods are more of an undertaking than others. 

Let’s look at two common ways beauty brands go headless and the pros and cons of both. 

Method 1: A custom-built headless tech stack

Traditionally, brands have taken their stores headless by assembling a custom-built headless tech stack—often referred to as composable commerce (or even Jamstack). 

This route allows you to cherry-pick the technology you prefer to power your beauty store.

There are several parts involved in creating a true headless stack and in this method, you choose every component, like your content delivery network (CDN), CMS, server-side rendering (SSR), etc. This is headless architecture in the truest sense, but it’s complex and has a heavy developer focus:

This may sound ideal if you’re particularly opinionated on things like Netlify vs. Vercel, or React vs. Vue. But for brands making less than $500 GMV annually or without large developer teams for infrastructure setup and maintenance, you may not be opinionated on which specific technologies to use for your site. 

Juggling various vendor relationships and piecemeal tech like this can get complicated quickly. Plus, your internal ecommerce team will be tasked with making big decisions around (and maintaining!) every piece of your frontend. This can quickly turn you into a tech company (instead of a beauty brand focused on revenue!) 

This road to headless, while offering the benefits of a flexible frontend, can add up quickly in terms of both time and budget. 

Method 2: A headless frontend platform

As seen in method one, headless commerce has long been a developer-centric technology (it’s required lots of development, and the tools for making it happen have appealed largely to developers). 

But these days, headless frontend platforms—like Shogun Frontend—are changing what’s possible. 

Headless frontend platforms take a merchant-focused, accessible approach, meaning non-technical team members or brands with lighter developer resources can enjoy the benefits of headless. 

All-in-one platforms like this eliminate the need for composing an entire headless stack (which is a huge undertaking—even for nimble teams). This way, your beauty brand can focus on revenue-driving initiatives instead of worrying about your website technology.

Here’s how Shogun Frontend enables beauty ecommerce teams:

Your ecommerce team members are in control

We understand how important a flexible yet reliable CMS is to any ecommerce brand, so we’ve built our own system native to Shogun Frontend. 

Not only this, but your team can build and publish store content with confidence and ease with a visual experience manager. You can see how things look as you build with a live preview, make changes at scale, and automate product catalog updates. 

Shogun Frontend sites are built with reusable codeless content sections, meaning your non-technical team can make changes and updates to the site once your core modules have been built out initially, allowing your dev resources to focus on other areas. 

A developer-friendly environment

The pre-built templates, sections, and reusable code included in our Starter Kit help you jumpstart your build. Your devs will have direct access to CMS data, which allows them to build custom experiences, workflows, and more. 

Plus, Shogun Frontend is built with React.js to ensure your site is ready for however your brand and the ecommerce landscape evolve.

Headless tech for scaling beauty ecommerce brands

As a beauty ecommerce team, you  have your plate full. Headless commerce enables your team to thrive in the now and future-proof tomorrow’s growth. 

What was once a technology for deep-pocketed companies is now accessible to rising brands a la headless frontend platforms. If your brand is considering headless commerce, make sure you weigh your team’s capabilities against each headless method. 

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Ready to take your beauty ecommerce store headless?<cta-title>See what’s possible with Shogun Frontend. Learn more