Beauty in Distress - Cosmetics Web Sites

American Demographics, Jan, 2001 by Alison Stein Wellner

What's more, the customized nature of its offering has allowed Reflect to leverage the data mining capabilities of the Internet into a product sampling campaign. The sampling strategy has helped keep down the company's abandoned shopping cart rate (purchases that are initiated, but then abandoned). "If a person leaves something in their shopping bag, we send them a sample of what they created, with their name on it, for them to try," Gerstein says.

But doesn't the process of creating a customized cosmetic product depend on sight and smell - senses that are not exactly stimulated by today's Internet? On the color front, Reflect "compensates" for monitor disparity by using a series of questions about hair, eye, and skin color, and then offers a range of colors for the consumers to pick from based on their answers. When it comes to smell, Reflect uses descriptions, like "coconut" to help consumers know what their custom shampoo will smell like. "As long as we give a good description, if you say it's going to smell like coconut, they get it," Gerstein says. For custom fragrances, Reflect sends customers a $5 sample of their creation to try out - and they can apply the money back to their ultimate perfume purchase.

But technology that's just beginning to break onto computers today, could put an end to the search for "smell" capability and accurate color substitutes. For example, E-Color, a San Francisco-based company, is in the business of eliminating the problem of monitor color disparity. You'll download a cookie that reads your monitor's color output. When you surf over to an E-Color ready site, the cookie will "read" your monitor. If your monitor adds a bluish tinge to everything on your screen, for example, the cookie will tell the server to tone down the blue values in the burgundy lipstick you're considering.

Peter Bernard, E-Color's vice president, projects that 130 million computers will be equipped with this capability by 2002. In fact, the company just entered into a deal with Compaq in which the computer company will ship E-Color software with all of its monitors. "When you go to a physical store, the retailer controls your sensory input: music, lighting, the salesperson. On the Web it's just this piece of glass. Having control over that is fundamental to being a successful beauty e-tailer," says Bernard. (The company just announced its first deal with a beauty dot-com, signing on to color-correct L'Oreal's Web site.) In fact, a recent study by Buystream - an e-commerce research firm in San Francisco - shows that consumers are more likely to buy when they know merchandise has been color-corrected. The visit-to-buy ratio for sites with products that hadn't been color-corrected was between 2 percent and 3 percent, according to Buystream. But with color correction, that ratio jumped fivefold, to nearly 14 percent.

As new technology addresses the problem of color accuracy, it will also tackle a smellier issue. Today, it's impossible to transmit scents over the Internet. But tomorrow, the capability may be as commonplace as diskettes. digiScents, an Oakland, California-based company, has designed a product called iSmell Personal Scent Synthesizer. It's a speaker-size peripheral device that you'd plug into your computer. Imagine an ink jet printer that's loaded with various scent cartridges instead of ink. When the device receives the right code from a Web site, it emits the smell according to the formula. This will help consumers in the market for fragrance, shampoo, and any kind of cosmetic. Young and Rubicam's Intelligence Factory predicts that this capability will be available to consumers within a few years.