In the fast-paced world of online beauty retail, embracing innovation has always been essential. Technologies like Virtual Reality and AI-driven personalization have fuelled growth, offering immersive experiences and building brand loyalty. While innovation promises enhanced DX and higher conversion rates, increasing the complexity of your digital infrastructure can inadvertently disrupt the digital customer experience, leading to lost sales and brand damage.
How technological innovation can undermine Digital Experience (DX)
Unbuyable products, unexpected slowdowns, missing prices and images, and checkout errors—each innovation and its interaction with other functionality can introduce friction and drive customers away. Many of these issues are intermittent or occur under specific circumstances, making them difficult to detect. And despite the built-in tools and plugins offered by many digital commerce platforms, smooth implementation isn’t guaranteed, and frictionless DX can remain elusive.
Key challenges for online beauty retailers
We take a look at some key challenges in beauty digital commerce that could increase DX risk.
1. Immersive, Personalised Experiences
Use of AI-driven hyper-personalization and AR/VR provides tailored and immersive experiences. However integration of these tools, compatibility conflicts and interaction with third-parties can exacerbate DX friction, resulting in unbuyable products and unexpected slowdowns.
2. Social Selling & Influencer Partnerships
Leveraging social influence and brand communities helps reach new audiences, but integrating third-party or built-in influencer and social selling apps can introduce DX friction including checkout errors and technical glitches.
3. Customer Loyalty programs & subscriptions
Implementing loyalty programs and product recommendations involves analysing past purchases and predictive modelling. DX risk comes from configuring these tools and managing product options, combinations, and promotions. Business logic issues can lead to missing product information and stock management problems leading to unbuyable products.
4. Incorporating Social Awareness
Addressing socially conscious purchasing including clean beauty, environmental impact, and diversity is critical for beauty buyers. However, showcasing user-generated content and recommended products to support these values introduces new risks to DX.
5. Streamlining the checkout process
Providing multiple payment and checkout options have all been shown to increase conversions. Implementation of these options adds a layer of complexity, which, if left unchecked, can result in technical glitches and checkout errors such as obscured checkout pathways and unresponsive buttons.
With so many priorities and limited staff resources, how can you address DX friction that could be hurting your conversions?
Embrace innovation but remain vigilant
DX obstacles remain undetected by conventional tools and error logs and arise unexpectedly – on specific products, baskets or at particular times – making them difficult to detect and address.
Real-world DX monitoring is key to identifying and resolving issues before they impact your customers. Performing the same tasks on the same real browsers, native apps, and operating systems as your customers, 24/7, reveals barriers to conversion on your site. And you can save time getting to the bottom of root causes with hard evidence across teams, video replay of issues and fast drill-down to granular data. Plus a service-based solution frees up valuable staff resources to focus on developing your store in line with business objectives.
Online beauty retailers must embrace innovation but need to remain vigilant, by monitoring DX 24/7 to ensure a frictionless shopping experience, reduce abandonment, and protect their brand.
Learn more about the DX friction that may be hidden from your view and how it impacts conversion rates in our eBook ‘The hidden causes of DX friction’.
