The industry’s global leaders
With so many brands, all with their own niches and consumer segments, competition is steep and plenty. Even so, there are still several companies that have reached global levels of success. When it comes to revenue, in both the beauty e-commerce and personal care e-commerce markets, the United States takes the leading spot. U.S. consumers have a multitude of brands to choose from when doing their online selfcare shopping: Sephora, Ulta, and Bed, Bath & Beyond are the top online stores, raking in millions of dollars annually generated through e-commerce.On the global scale, Sephora remains a huge player, known for its retailing of high quality cosmetics in both brick-and-mortar stores and online. Sephora’s primary retail site, sephora.com, amassed nearly 58 million visits in April 2022 alone. However, despite Sephora’s immense popularity, the health, beauty, and personal care online retailer to come out on top in sales was Chinese e-commerce giant, Alibaba. The company was expected to generate nearly 60 billion U.S. dollars in sales in 2022, with this figure forecasted to nearly double by 2027. In China alone, Alibaba’s gross merchandise value of selfcare products reaches several billions of yuan each month.
Trends among online beauty shoppers
With so many people practicing selfcare, not everyone can have the same, or even similar, routines around the world. Despite this, some trends among the global populace of beauty and personal care shoppers can be pinpointed. Around 30 percent of online shoppers globally preferred to do their beauty and personal care shopping online. Health and beauty shoppers worldwide tended to spend an average of around two U.S. dollars per online visit. Additionally, about three in ten women reported buying personal care products impulsively, in contrast to almost two in ten of their male counterparts who did the same.When it came to skin care, calamine lotion was the product that global shoppers searched for online the most in 2022. That same year, coconut oil was the specific ingredient that netted the most online search traffic worldwide, and consumers were most curious to know about the best vitamin C serums on the market.
