Do you know your beauty brand needs a store? And knowing how to build a beauty brand store, and in turn, building it, is pretty much like the next best thing for any bright-eyed beauty entrepreneur. The beauty industry is already worth a billion-dollar, and it keeps evolving. This means that your creative ideas have enough room to thrive. You may already have listings that have been optimized, and you may have generated some pretty good sales too. Yet a beauty brand store is a milestone you must erect if you want to turn the market table towards you and keep sales up.

Still wondering why you really need a beauty brand store since you are already making sales? Well, it is a wonderful way to display your products. Plus, it is also a great help in maintaining a professional reputation for your brand. If you are just a beginner, building a beauty brand store is like creating a mini-website where you can retail your products and services.

Building a beauty brand store is a good advertising strategy and a great way to go if you have products to offer to your clientele that are complementary to the regular ones.

Overall, the beauty industry is very competitive. Some find it easy. Others wade through many waters. Building a store for your beauty brand can add serious value to your business.

Want to sky-rocket your beauty brand? Here is an easy beauty brand guide to that will help you in designing and developing your beauty brand store. Let’s dive in.

ANALYSIS AND RESEARCH

The first step in building a store for your beauty brand is to get you thoroughly educated. You have a whole lot of learning to do. Spend quality time doing some research on the various aspects of your business. Cover as much as possible. Here are some prime areas that should never be overlooked.

1. Your target audience: The beauty market can be ambiguous and overwhelming. To build a store for beauty brand, you cannot afford to be a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none.  Your beauty brand store is a voice, your voice. You have to find out whom you want to talk to. For example, you have products to offer to women. Your niche is not just women. It could be Hispanic women, Black women, women who have kids, women who work outside the home, brides, female athletes, and so on. A very important question has to be answered and that is, who do you want to patronize your beauty brand store. This is like finding your own niche.

You also need to understand the demographics of your own audience -Their age bracket, their location, their spending-capacity, their interests, and so on.

2. Your product and competitors: Is your beauty product a consumer product or, do you have to sell to businesses directly? Does it have a factor of interest, for instance, health? Who are your competitors? How do they market products similar to yours? Find out their marketing strategies, what moves favors them, and what works contrary. Look up your competitors’ sites; evaluate the design, the presentation, and many more. Analyze every single detail, down to their packaging.

Thorough research and analysis will give you an idea of what you should do and how. It makes the picture in your mind clearer and gets you a long way in building your beauty brand store.

CLARITY AND CONSISTENCY

The time spent in research and analysis would serve in painting a picture in your heart of what image you want your beauty brand store to project to your target market. At this point, you know what you want your audience to perceive your brand as. Banking on the flaws of your competitors and improving on their advantages, you are now ready to make changes and improvements to your website. Having this clarity, you must employ consistency in building your beauty brand store. Your goal is to create a beauty brand store that has a high value in the eyes of your customers. This will be seen in the kind of content you put out there. Everything has to be top-notch. You have to consistently show up. In this era of social media, you have to create a presence that your customers can reckon with.

GET YOUR STORE ON THE MARKETPLACE

Now you are ready to open up your beauty brand store. An online store is a great idea. In building your own online store for your beauty brand, you do not necessarily need a certification in coding or professional tech skills. Your business idea and great internet connection are sufficient.

The following are steps in this beauty brand guide will guide you in building your online beauty brand store.

1. Determine your ideal e-commerce website build: There are tons of online store builders to choose from. Some are expensive, others are cheap. Some are dependable and can get you where you want to go, others are not. For a great experience, Shopify is a good option, especially if you are looking to create a beauty brand store where over 10 products will be sold. It has a design that is pleasant, plus it is easy to navigate.

Once you make a choice, the next thing is to put your e-commerce website builder to the test. You can test multiple website builders to see which one matches your preferences. One way of doing this is by using the free trials. You can follow this link to sign up for a free trial on Shopify: 14-day trial on Shopify. During the trial period, here’s a checklist to help you ascertain whether a particular builder is ideal for your beauty brand store

• Do I find it easy to choose themes and templates? Is it easy to make custom changes?
• Do the templates match the message of my beauty brand?
• Do I find it easy to put-up products? Is it easy to categorize products?
• Can you easily add new pages or sub menus?
• Overall, will this builder help me project the image I want for my beauty brand store?

2. Select the best plan for your store: Once your choice is made, the next thing to do is to select a plan that best suits your beauty brand store. Plans differ in what they offer – the more you pay, the more benefits you get. A great tip for selecting a plan with the best practice for beauty brand store in mind is to gauge the size of your business and your envisioned growth rate. The more products you offer, the better plan you will require. These questions will help you choose a plan for your beauty brand store

• Can you build the beauty brand store of your dreams for free?
• What specific features do you require?
• How much are you able and willing pay?
• How many products are you offering?

3. Get a domain name: Having a domain name is part of the compulsory thing to get when you want to build a store for beauty brand, and it puts you out there as a serious and trustworthy brand. For example, Mary Kay has its domain name (together with its URL) as https:www.marykay.com. A domain name can be purchased using a domain name registrar and then linked to your own online store builder. Through Shopify, you can buy a domain name by clicking here.

In case you already have a domain name, there’s really nothing to worry about. You have two options:

• You can transfer the domain name from your original provider to your store builder, after cancelling the previous agreement.
• Or you can just link the domain name to your online builder page. This way, you stay with your domain provider.

4. Choose and customize your e-commerce themes: A theme is an unspoken pointer to the profile and the personality of your beauty brand. In order to pick it a befitting theme or template for your beauty brand store, you must be clear on these points

• What distinct particulars do you want your beauty brand store to have?

Some themes come with more details than others. When you are clear on the features you want for your store (like an about us page, a gallery etc.), you can choose templates that match or are at least easy to tweak to suit your preferences.

• What layout do I want for my homepage

Your homepage is your shop window and customers can identify and evaluate your business with just one glance at your homepage. Your homepage should be stylish with features (such as images, a slideshow, or videos), that do the talking.

Once you have selected the best theme for your beauty brand, go right ahead and customize it.

• Colour schemes
• Texts and fonts
• Images
• Social media
• Related apps, etc.

All these should be customized to give your customers a unique perception of your beauty brand store.

The theme store on Shopify has about 10 free themes and over 40 paid ones. Each theme has a different look or feel to offer.

5. Put up you products: This step in this beauty brand guide, represents the interaction between your customers and your goods. Three important ingredients here are:

• Name
• Price
• Category

Another important point here is to know the limits your website builder has. Websites differ in the number of products you can put up for sale, the number of variants each product has, and the options (e.g. size) for each product.

To effectively upload your products, you will need a great product description, a high quality image of the product, and a category listing for each product.

6. Set up modes of payment: There are different payment methods to choose from. PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and Apple Pay. Here are three popular ways of accepting payment on your store:

• Credit card payment: Here, the service is combined with your checkout and shoppers can complete a purchase without leaving your site.
• Payment gateway packages: This service connects your store’s checkout with the credit card network.
• Merchant account and gateway: Here, you collaborate with a bank. The bank accepts payments for you and then transfers to your business account.

SECURITY: Online shopping can be risky and most shoppers feel insecure purchasing online. An easy way to secure your beauty brand store is to use a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. SSL encrypts user’s data. It is very beneficial to your brand because shoppers will feel secure on your site and Google will rank your store higher. Why not?

8. Figure out shipping: Different e-commerce builders have different shipping options. If you want to ship products, you will need to figure out these:

• Your shipping origin address: Your shipping address may not be the same as your office address. If that is your case you have to add your correct address. When this is done, you can get print labels for shipping and get quotes.
• Where do you want to ship to: Shipping rates differ between places. Your online store builder will let you charge differently, depending on the region or the country you ship your products to. Creating shipping zones helps to manage things better.
• What shipping options do you have: Once you have figured out where you want to ship your products to, the next thing is to understand the types of shipping.

• Free shipping
• Local pickup
• Shipping rates by order price
• Flat rate shipping

• Courier services: Some e-commerce website builders have a partnership with courier services like FedEx, Canada Post, etc.

8. Test run and publish your beauty brand store online: now that you’ve taken all the above steps and created your beauty brand store, there is just one last thing to do – testing. Here are things to test for :

• Checkout:

• Be sure that all payment methods are functional
• Be sure that the prices of items are correct.
• Ensure that taxes are correctly displayed

• Functionality: make sure your beauty brand store actually works. Test every link and clickable button and ensure they work. Let the maneuver across your store be smooth and not clumsy. Get friends and family to visit and test your site.
• Grammar: Check for spelling errors and poor spelling. You don’t want to offend customers with bad grammar.
• Accessibility: Test it on different devices and browsers. Your beauty brand store has to be accessible on different devices and browsers because your customers and their gadgets differ.
• Settings: Your store settings must be correct, else it won’t work properly. Here are some key things to check

• Store name
• Language
• Product information to display
• Currency
• Time zone
• Contact address

Once you are happy with the entire build-up, your beauty brand store is ready to take off. So go on and hit that ‘publish’ button. Alternatively, you can consult a Shopify expert for beauty brand store to help out.

I trust you find this ultimate beauty brand guide helpful.