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AI-Powered Beauty Tech Transforms E-Commerce
Discover how India's leading beauty retailer leveraged AI and community features to achieve a 40% add-to-bag conversion rate and build a 250K-strong user community.

TABLE OF CONTENT

Beauty Retail Innovation Leader in India

A leading online beauty and wellness retailer with over 20 million active users, processing 500,000+ daily orders. As India's premier multi-brand cosmetics platform, they offer 1200+ brands across makeup, skincare, haircare, fragrances, and wellness products through six nationwide warehouses.

Legacy Systems Limiting Digital Growth

The beauty retailer faced critical obstacles in maintaining market leadership and user engagement:

1. Outdated Content Management

The retailer's blog platform was running on an outdated WordPress V3 version, resulting in significant performance issues. Page load times were 40% higher than industry standards, severely impacting user experience. Security vulnerabilities from deprecated plugins and malware posed constant threats to site stability. Content categorization was entirely manual, making it difficult for users to discover relevant articles and product recommendations. With 65% of their users accessing the platform via mobile devices, the limited responsive design was creating a substantial barrier to engagement.

2. Inefficient Video Commerce

Despite having a rich library of beauty content, the retailer's video ecosystem was disconnected from their core platform. All videos were hosted externally on YouTube without any integration into the shopping experience. Product identification in videos was a manual process, taking their team 4-5 hours per video. When users wanted to purchase products shown in videos, they had to navigate through a complex 6-step journey, often leading to cart abandonment. The lack of real-time inventory sync meant users frequently encountered unavailable products, creating frustration and missed sales opportunities.

3. Fragmented User Experience

Users had to navigate between separate interfaces for blog content, videos, and shopping, breaking the natural discovery-to-purchase flow. The absence of a unified user profile meant customers had to maintain multiple logins and couldn't access their preferences across platforms. The inconsistent design language between different sections of the platform created a disjointed experience, while scattered customer data made it impossible to deliver personalized recommendations.

4. Limited Community Features

Despite having a large and engaged customer base, the platform lacked mechanisms for harnessing community power. There was no infrastructure for user-generated content or peer-to-peer beauty advice. Beauty enthusiasts couldn't interact directly with experts or participate in real-time discussions. The absence of live streaming capabilities meant they couldn't capitalize on the growing trend of live commerce. Without proper community features, valuable customer insights and organic content creation opportunities were being lost.

These challenges were not just technical limitations – they were actively hindering the retailer's ability to innovate and maintain their market leadership in India's rapidly evolving beauty e-commerce landscape.

Building an AI-Powered Beauty Tech Ecosystem

Unthinkable crafted a comprehensive solution focused on three core areas to transform the retailer's digital presence and create a seamless beauty shopping experience:

1. Shoppable Video Innovation

The team revolutionized the video shopping experience by developing a custom video streaming player that seamlessly integrated with the retailer's YouTube channel. At the heart of this solution was an AI-powered product recognition system that automatically identified products featured in videos, eliminating manual tagging processes. The "Watch and Buy" feature enabled real-time purchasing directly through the video interface, reducing the path to purchase from six steps to just one click. To ensure optimal performance, videos were hosted on Akamai CDN, while automation scripts synchronized engagement metrics every 10 minutes. An innovative Embed API was also developed, allowing content sharing across third-party platforms to expand reach and generate additional traffic.

2. Modernized Content Platform

A thorough technical audit revealed multiple performance bottlenecks in the existing blog infrastructure. The solution involved upgrading WordPress from V3 to V4.5, coupled with a comprehensive security overhaul. The team performed extensive database cleanup, removing unnecessary tables and malware files. Integration of Elasticsearch transformed content discovery, enabling real-time search and personalized content recommendations. The mobile-first UI redesign utilized advanced plugins like Smart Product Viewer and Awesome Header to create an engaging, responsive experience across all devices.

3. Interactive Community Network

The new community platform was built using Java for web and Android applications, with Swift powering the iOS experience. At its core was a sophisticated content management system using MongoDB and MySQL, enabling complex content categorization and user relationship mapping. The platform incorporated several innovative features:

  • Natural Language Processing (NLP) for sentiment analysis and product mentions
  • Computer Vision technology for real-time product detection in user-generated content
  • Supervised learning algorithms for smart content recommendations
  • Live video streaming capabilities for expert sessions and tutorials
  • Elasticsearch-powered content categorization for improved discovery

The Laravel PHP framework tied these components together, optimizing performance through advanced caching and SQL optimization. The solution also included comprehensive APIs for data communication, enabling seamless integration with the retailer's existing systems and future expansions. This holistic approach transformed the retailer's digital platform from a basic e-commerce site into an engaging, AI-powered beauty tech ecosystem that seamlessly blended content, commerce, and community.

Impact we created

01

40% add-to-bag conversion rate on shoppable videos

02

42% reduction in blog bounce rate

03

123% increase in blog engagement time

04

250K community network subscribers

05

13K new weekly community members

06

7.8% higher average order value through community

Conclusion

Through strategic implementation of AI-powered features and community-driven engagement tools, the beauty retailer successfully transformed their digital presence. The solution not only enhanced user experience but also established new benchmarks in beauty e-commerce, combining content, community, and commerce into a seamless experience.

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