Luxury Beauty on Amazon

When you think of Amazon, luxury beauty might not spring to mind; we’d usually make a B-line to the famous platform for the next-day-delivery of a new book or extension cable, not a top-up of your favourite luxury beauty cream. Luxury brands have long been resistant to sell on Amazon but the tides are turning… Luxury brands have been adverse to their products being sold alongside low value and fast-moving consumer goods such as toilet paper. They also feared poor brand representation versus their own-brand websites. However, the tides are turning for a number of reasons. Since lockdown there’s been a bigger shift towards online shopping: ‘the prestige beauty market was valued at £926 million in the first half of 2022, per NPD’ (Vogue, 2022). As consumers tighten their belts, they’ve moved towards price-matching platforms such as Amazon. Moreover, Amazon is constantly evolving their content creation capabilities.

High-end beauty brands have the unique benefit of ‘brand gating’ within Amazon’s Luxury Beauty Category. This means Amazon will restrict unauthorised sellers/third-party re-sellers from selling gated brands’ products. This is important and hugely beneficial for both the brands and consumers - it prevents sales disruption, conflict with existing channel customers and protects brand equity, not to mention that consumers are confident that they’re shopping from a genuine source.

Amazon’s expansion of their content optimisation offering equips luxury brands with the ability to create premium content to appropriately reflect the higher price point products. Amazon has now launched Luxury Stores, a dedicated landing page to shop all things luxury within beauty and fashion on Amazon.

The feature launched in the US in 2020, but has only recently been rolled out to Europe. Amazon carved out the unique space to feature ‘established and emerging luxury brands’ (Amazon, 2022) and push the representation of more premium brands on the platform. There are more exciting content offerings too, such as autoplay imagery and in-motion graphics to create an ‘elevated experience’ (Amazon, 2022).

Within Premium Beauty, brands are also beginning to optimise their listings with Brand Story modules, A+ Premium content and build more luxury stores. They’re implementing 360° images, video content and interactive modules, such as Q&A’s, shoppable hotspots and galleries.

Luxury Beauty on Amazon provides a unique opportunity for brands to increase their potential customer base and reach, whilst keeping their integrity. However, the majority of the brands featured aren’t realising their full potential with their content offering - could this be due to lack of knowledge or experience of the platform, or possibly insufficient resources?

If you’re having trouble fully showcasing your luxury brand with premium content, we’d love to have a chat with you about the opportunities available.

Check out more example of Amazon content optimised by the Tambo team here.