Your homepage is your online brand’s identity. This is the very first page a user will get to see when they visit your online store. It should be able to scream everything your brand is all about while also being able to convert store visitors to loyal customers.
However, designing a homepage that ticks all the boxes and enhances a customer’s shopping journey can be pretty tricky for starters.
Continuing on our beauty and cosmetics series, where we share various tried and tested design tips to help take your online brand to new heights, we’ve created a list of eCommerce homepage strategies that you need to implement in your beauty and cosmetics Shopify website.
If you missed our first post in this series, you can read it here: Product page conversion must-haves for beauty and cosmetics brands.
Beauty and cosmetics home page design tips to boost conversion rates
1. Add important information in the header promo bar
Present the unique selling point of your store here. You could add information about all your new launches, ongoing sales, and free shipping facility here.
Ideally, the header promo bar is displayed in a bright color that catches the user’s attention from the get-go. Furthermore, you can add a CTA here. The promo bar is usually common to all pages on the website. But, a homepage is where a user usually sees it first.
Here’s how Sephora integrates this design element into their beauty and cosmetics website on Shopify.
2. Use eye-catchy hero image(s)
Grab your store visitor’s attention from the very first instant by using high-quality hero images.
Here’s how Supergoop! displays its brand proposition through the use of joyful human faces in its hero element on the homepage. People love pictures with faces. Human beings are wired to incline towards faces and develop trust instantly. Facial expressions are universal and can be leveraged to create a positive feeling towards your products.
By strategically placing a big and clear CTA button in the center, along with a catchy copy, you can gauge the user’s attention effortlessly.
3. Showcase your best sellers
Displaying best seller products helps direct a user’s attention towards a particular direction. It also helps them make a quicker and better purchase decision. This is a simple design psychology tip to improve your conversions.
The homepage is a great place to display this section. Ideally, you can place it right below the hero element. Here’s an example from the Milk Makeup website.
4. Feature the latest collection as a featured section on your storefront
Your homepage is a great place to announce any new launches, collections, collaborations, etc. By adding a clear and distinct header image to display these details you can direct your consumers towards exploring the new range. When store visitors land on your storefront and start scrolling, this is one of the first things they see.
Do not forget to add a clear CTA here. It brings more visibility to a new collection and boosts sales.
Here’s an example of how Kylie Cosmetics integrates this design element in their online storefront.
Also read: Shopify Store Design Breakdown - Dissecting Kylie Cosmetics and their Store Design
5. Display categories to guide the consumers
Too many products displayed all at once is bound to confuse the consumer. However, a systematically categorized product catalog helps the user make better purchase decisions. This reduces a buyer’s confusion and anxiety tremendously. You don’t want your site visitors to get overwhelmed and walk away.
These categories can be mentioned in the menu bar on all pages of your beauty and cosmetics Shopify website. You can take this a notch up by also adding a dedicated section displaying various categories on your homepage itself.
Here’s how Minimalist, an Indian skincare brand, displays its product categories. This brand caters to 3 main skin issues and that is what it uses to categorize its entire product catalog. It seamlessly helps the user in picking the right products, and hence improves conversion rates.
6. Add educational content if your product/service requires it
People frame opinions about most beauty and cosmetic products based on their past experiences. If your brand offers something that is quite different from what is usually available in the market, you will have to first educate your consumers. This is very important because otherwise, they will not see value in your brand and products.
For instance, Drunken Elephant is a beauty and cosmetics brand that is committed to using as few ingredients as possible while formulating its products. Most consumers may not be aware of this wave of ‘clean’ skincare. Hence, they’ve dedicated an entire section of their online storefront to address this.
Bite-sized content is easier to digest and comprehend, as compared to lengthy paragraphs. This brand has very strategically divided this section into 6 tiny sub-sections, which makes processing the information so much easier. The idea is to educate the users without having to overwhelm them.
7. Enable live chat on your website
Beauty and cosmetics is an industry where consumers usually require assistance. Beauty and cosmetics websites on Shopify can offer a live chat option to offer this assistance. This will enhance your user’s shopping experience.
Also read: Ecommerce Web Design Breakdown - Fenty Beauty by Rihanna
8. Talk about your brand values
Consumers of today are better-informed and want to make politically and socially conscious purchase decisions. Close to 71% of consumers prefer buying from brands whose brand ethos and values align with their own. 83% of millennials consider this an absolute necessity when shopping.
Mango People is a beauty brand founded by Sravya Adusumilli. She envisions her brand to be “a place for equal representation, sustainability, and transparency within the industry”.
Their website homepage highlights all these key points. Thus, it gets the target audience invested from the very first glance at their website.
9. Add trusted testimonials
It is natural to be skeptical about shopping from an online beauty and cosmetics brand.
Your website needs to be designed with the prime intention of erasing this skepticism. Your website should help you establish trust and credibility from the very first page, i.e the homepage.
One way to achieve this is by the use of adequate social proof. You can display testimonials of happy customers describing their experience of shopping from your store and using your products. This will help a new potential consumer develop a sense of trust in your brand.
Here’s an example from Kama Ayurveda, an Indian skincare and wellness brand.
10. Showcase your Instagram feed
The beauty and cosmetics industry is heavily inclined towards visual aesthetics. And so, social media platforms like Instagram that run on visual content are great places for a beauty brand to be. Today, an online brand presence has become an absolute necessity in almost all domains of markets, particularly in the D2C sphere.
You can add a section flaunting your Instagram feed on your website to give a better overview of what exactly your brand is. You can also initiate an interaction with them by asking them to share their pictures using certain hashtags.
It is a great practice to integrate this section towards the end of your homepage, right above your footer.
Here’s how the luxury beauty giant, Estee Lauder executes this.
11. Add links to resourceful content
You can help enhance a user’s shopping experience by providing them with a few handy resourceful contents. These could include blogs, lookbooks, etc. Placing a dedicated section of this on the homepage is a great design tip vouched by Shopify experts. This is because on the homepage, a visitor may not have something specific in mind, so you can use content to nurture and guide them towards making an actual purchase.
12. Use videos for better delivery
Your brain processes video 60,000 times faster than just plain text. And so, videos capture and engage attention better.
Adding videos to your Shopify website design helps create a better narrative that evokes emotions. An average online user spends 88% more time on a website that makes use of videos.
On your online beauty and cosmetics website, you could add a video of your most bought or recent collaboration, for instance.
13. Page speed
Users become frustrated with slow and laggy websites. Today, setting up an online store has become very simple. However, optimizing it to deliver the best results requires much more work. Compressing the images used and analyzing your website performance periodically, among many other practices, will enhance the overall User Experience (UX) of your Shopify product page design.
Also read - Expert CRO Tips: How To Optimize Your Shopify Store Page Speed
Conclusion
Setting up a high-converting store design for your beauty and cosmetics brands is no easy task. To build and design an impressive store, you need to work with Shopify design experts who understand what you are looking for and have the industry knowledge of the changing trends and consumer preferences.
Also read: Why Your Shopify Store Design Is Important to Increase Conversion Rates
We help you bring your ideas to life with Shopify web design, development, marketing, and support services from experts. Our team of Shopify experts works with Shopify merchants like you to design the store that reflects the personality of your brand and caters to the functionalities you require. Whether you want to revamp your existing design or build a new one from scratch, we will help you create a positive shopping experience on your Shopify store design.
Reach out to us at info@xgentech.net and we’ll help you set up your Shopify store design!
We're working with some leading Shopify and Shopify Plus brands to help them design a great online experience for their customers. If you are a beauty and cosmetics brand looking for more design inspiration, do explore these brands -
Learn more about our Shopify experts for beauty and cosmetics brands here.
