Makeup and Skincare Trends on Walmart.com

This is the fourth of our six part series on Walmart’s pivot to digital.

Today, we’ll see how a few leading Makeup/Skincare brands are using three fundamental eCommerce levers to succeed on Walmart’s digital shelf.  Earlier, we examined three key facets of Walmart’s digital initiatives and what implications they have for brands, as well as a glance at the Consumer Electronics category on Walmart, and later we’ll take a look at how the leaders in the Snacks and Sodas categories are navigating the new Walmart.com, and wrap up with a few best practices brands should use to win on Walmart’s online properties.  Also included is a Q/A blog post with Planet Retail RNG senior analyst David Gray and Clavis Insight Chief Marketing Officer Danny Silverman, as they tackle several key questions generated by attendees of our recent special edition webinar, “Winning on Walmart Part 2: Driving Traffic, Sales and Share on Walmart’s Online Properties,” which can be found here.  

 

In May of this year Walmart unveiled a brand new website, capping off its major strategic shift from traditional retail to digital. The new Walmart.com is already one of the biggest and busiest eCommerce platforms across all categories - from groceries to white goods - but Walmart’s digital evolution isn’t done yet. Eventually, it plans to rival or even surpass Amazon in digital dominance, so learning to win on Walmart.com must be a priority for every brand.  

Today Makeup and Skincare is one of the most active battlefields in online retail, but also one of the newest. Historically, shopping in these categories was driven through experiential retail at traditional outlets, where customers could touch, smell and sample products in-store.  This means that Walmart’s brick-and-mortar background gives it a huge advantage over its pureplay competitors like Amazon.  In this category, where reputation and customer confidence are especially important, Walmart has already built up a legacy of (mostly) good feelings. In the wake of Walmart’s new focus on digital, this space will only continue to be one of the most important and hotly contested arenas in online retail.  Read below to get our insights on how makeup and skincare brands are leveraging key metrics like Search, Ratings/Reviews, and Availability to win on Walmart.com right now.

Search:

Most of the biggest cosmetics brands have been sold by Walmart for decades, so the shift to Walmart.com has been relatively straightforward. One makeup brand that stands head and shoulders above the rest, however, is NYX Professional Makeup.  At one stage during our research, NYX controlled 70% of first-page results for the term ‘makeup.’ This is a performance unmatched in almost every other category. One reason for this success is that NYX has optimized keywords and content for the term “makeup,” and added it to product titles. Instead of calling a product “black eyeliner,” for example, NYX sells “black eyeliner makeup”. This greatly expands their products’ reach.

Skincare, on the other hand, is much more evenly distributed. Johnson & Johnson leads with 25% of first-page results, followed by Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Image Skincare, each with 15%. Search results are an important metric to track, since performing well in search is a reliable indicator of strong brand performance within the target category overall. And because the majority of shoppers don’t scroll past the first page of results, this means that the leaders in these terms (especially NYX) are leaders in these categories as a whole. 

Ratings & Reviews: 

Most of the leading brands in Makeup & Skincare are established legacy brands and have refined their products to a high level of reliability, and the average rating for most of the top 5 brands reflects this.  The top five brands by review count all have ratings of between 4.2 and 4.6 stars - this means that number of ratings is even more important in this category.  For example, Procter & Gamble has an average rating of 4.5 stars compared to Maybelline’s 4.2, but Maybelline has over 30,000 more reviews, giving it the potential for a higher conversion rate.

Availability:

Product Availability as a metric is almost irrelevant here - low-stock issues are almost non-existent for Makeup & Skincare market leaders.  Both Procter & Gamble  and Johnson & Johnson have only one active SKU that’s tagged as low-stock while NYX and Maybelline both have none.  Although this takes away a major avenue for brands to gain ground on their competitors, cosmetics companies can’t afford to grow complacent here - we’ve seen first hand how poor performance in product availability can seriously damage brands’ ability to compete on Walmart.com (and other online retailers).  

Although it was late coming to the party, makeup and skincare is now one of the most competitive categories in eCommerce. Any cosmetics brand looking to capitalize on Walmart.com, though, must understand the new environment and be prepared to optimize the fundamentals, like search, ratings and reviews, and product availability.


 

To go more in depth on how to succeed in this new environment, give part 1 and part 2 of our Winning on Walmart webinars a listen, download our latest whitepaper Driving eCommerce Sales on Walmart’s Online Properties, and check out the other blog posts in this series here.
 

 

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