ReCommerce on ‘Making Amazon Click’ for Beauty Brands

Beauty brands are bolstering their growth and glam factor across multiple channels, via Amazon — and according to digital agency ReCommerce, the platform is poised to push said brands to the next level.

At the WWD Beauty CEO Summit, the talk “Making Amazon Click for Beauty Brands,” led by Taylor Hamilton, chief executive officer and cofounder of ReCommerce, an Amazon accelerator that works with brands in the beauty and personal care space, discussed how companies can utilize the platform to boost sales in brick-and-mortar stores, direct-to-consumer channels and on Amazon itself.

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ReCommerce helps brands take control of their presence on the platform and achieve strategic goals — and as a top seller on Amazon, ReCommerce has over 300 people dedicated to accelerating its partner’s businesses and boasts proven success in the space.

When Hamilton founded ReCommerce, he didn’t aim to dominate Amazon, but rather help brands create a holistic strategy on the platform that works in conjunction with brick-and-mortar and d-to-c businesses to generate growth across all three channels.

Hamilton explained that his perspective makes him uniquely qualified to lead the discussion. Hailing from a brick-and-mortar background where he owned a chain of specialty retail stores, he “experienced firsthand the challenges that Amazon can create for both brands, and brick-and-mortar retailers.”

Roughly one-third of all beauty sales transacted on the internet happen on Amazon and that number is increasing every year, according to ReCommerce’s data. Hamilton said it all boils down to brands having complete control on the platform, which allows them to decide on items of import such as content appearance; customer interaction; the leveraging of Amazon’s data for customer acquisition; packaging and shipping of products, and even gain insight into the unboxing experience.

“Amazon is a marketplace, but it’s also a quasi-d-to-c platform that has the built-in benefit of coming pre-packaged with 200 million customers every month, and the ability to mine the largest and most complete set of first-party purchase data available in the world in order to advertise to new customers,” he said.

In analyzing over 300 of the top Specialty Beauty brick-and-mortar retail stores, ReCommerce found that 89 percent of those brands are currently being sold on Amazon in some way — but only 48 percent of them have a “managed capacity,” which means that their presence is being managed in some way, and roughly half the brands have an “unmanaged capacity,” or no control over aspects such as presence, content, pricing or strategy.

Brands can gain control on Amazon through six key areas: content optimization, or optimizing creative on Amazon to align across multiple channels; catalogue, creating digital-first content optimized for Amazon and “peppering” the key words into listings so brands can “win” on Amazon advertising; marketplace support, which allows brands to access, mine and strategize with Amazon’s exclusive buyer data; advertising, to tie in creative with the leveraging of buyer data for new customer acquisition; brand protection, which includes benefits such as the elimination of counterfeits; and logistics, or being omnipresent for wherever and however customers want to purchase products.

To sum it up, Hamilton said, “Brands that really lean into Amazon for its strengths have had a tremendous amount of success on the platform accelerating growth, while simultaneously accelerating growth through their brick-and-mortar channels and direct-to-consumer sites — all at the same time.”

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