Skin-care Industry Today and in the Future

The increasing popularity of the internet has greatly impacted the social lifestyle in the past ten years. Online shopping, an electronic commerce application used for B2B or B2C, has brought consumers significant convenience and benefits.

People are no longer constrained by location and time. They can buy daily commodities while at home or at work and their can trade with people throughout theworld.

Additionally, monopoly becomes almost impossible. Threatened by the powerful search engines, online sellers have to rationalize their prices. Besides that, efficient exchange of information on the internet enables consumers to share knowledge and newest trends globally which increase the competence and washing out process.  

Some leading e-commerce websites like Ebay, Amazon, Alibaba have prospered greatly these years and even formed their own merchandise chains. Their most successful online-products include books, electronics and apparels. The share of skin care products in total transactions are much smaller compared to that of books or apparels. This could be explained by analysizing the unique nature of skin-care products.

If we compare skin-care products to apparels, we can see that skin-care products have more technical content. You can judge the aesthetic value of a skirt according to your personal taste, but you cannot tell whether a toner is effective to you by looking at it on web pages. It will take several weeks for a customer to find out the results of a facial product and he cannot return an unsatisfactory facial product as he returns a book. Besides that, skin-care products are specific to person. Unlike electronics, that has fixed configuration whose performance is foreseeable, the effectiveness of skin-care products is affected by a set of human factors like skin types and life habits. To avoid the conceivable risk involved in buying online skin-care products, consumers feel more confident to sit in front of the counters in shopping malls and talk with the skin-care “professionals”.   

All the success of the e-commerce came from the fact that people found satisfactory analogies or even better solutions of buying products online than shopping at physical malls. The nature of skin-care products suggests that if they want to succeed in the battle of e-commerce, a more professional, credited, and specific-to-person service should be provided.

Urskin.com will explore the possible better solutions in online skin-care business. We are ready to improve the online skin-care service by providing our customers with following features.

Firstly, it should have professional background and be able to give scientifically persuasive guidance to its consumers.

Secondly, using the database technology, we will set up a tracking system to keep records of all the products and results our consumers are using and encourage customers to have their own “skin-portfolios”. In the future, a skin-care product use record should be as commonly used as a disease record card which will maximize the effectiveness of individualized skin protection.

Thirdly, inspired by “wiki”, we will encourage customer contribution and information exchange. Product reviews, user’s blog, and other “skin-care community” which will provide unbiased information exchange and direct people to right products globally.

In one word, the website should serve as an integrated information system and provide more personalized service to individuals.   

The future trends in online skin-care industry is that the service will be more specialized and personalized.

One-on-one dermatologist works closely with individuals and helps them to choose products and build up good skin-care habits.

The mysteries of skin-care products will be decoded. People look up a product’s effectiveness to certain type of skin and its chemical ingredients online and find quick match.

Furthermore, the achievement in scientific labs will be accessible to consumers in a much shorter process and the line of scientists, dermatologists, skin-care product manufacturers and consumers will be knitted tightly into a consumer-oriented relationship. The more individualized and private online skin-care diagnosing and learning system will certainly be the most important means to realize this skin-care revolution. When the whole system can be legalized and build on a profitable way in the future, we believe it will greatly perfect people’s life quality and contribute to the general well-being.

Author: Nina Liu