Brazil’s personal care and cosmetics market is skyrocketing with growing sales driven by a fashion-conscious and beauty-obsessed population. Brazil, the cosmetics industry veteran, is the third largest consumer of beauty products worldwide and relies heavily on traditional channels for distribution. Online retailing has made inroads into the personal care market in Brazil and is on a slow but steady growth trajectory with immense potential in the future.
Brazilian consumers have long exhibited strong interest in personal care and beauty products, mostly purchased through traditional distribution channels. Over the past couple of years, these consumers have gradually also begun shopping for beauty products online, however, they are still skeptical about payment security as well as delayed delivery and quality of products.
Despite the obstacles, some online retailers — such as Natura, Men’s Market, and BelezaNaWeb — have stepped up to overcome hurdles and develop robust strategies to initiate online purchase of personal care products. After realizing potential of online retailing in the personal care and cosmetics segment, investors have started pouring in money in e-commerce websites to reap benefits.
Personal care segment can benefit from numerous growth opportunities in the e-commerce market with consumers’ rising inclination towards special offers attracting them to shop online, beauty product segment’s growing share in the emerging online shopping market, m-commerce boosting online sales, etc. E-retailers should exploit these opportunities to penetrate the market and improve sales.
EOS Perspective
While the e-commerce industry faces various obstacles, a robust online strategy along with a balanced eco-system — comprising fraud protection arrangement, better payment mechanism, developed infrastructure, as well as clear understanding of consumer behavior — is likely to improve e-commerce adoption and increase sales.
The market is slowly overcoming some of the hurdles — to combat logistics issue, government has started investing in air and shipping ports to facilitate parcel deliveries through these modes. This is likely to improve shipment timelines and consumers, as desired, can avail quick delivery of personal care products. Further, online retailers have started assessing consumer behavior and responded by improving shopping experience by re-designing websites, launching m-commerce applications for convenient mobile browsing, and implementing loyalty programs. The Brazilian government is working towards implementing stringent regulations to protect consumers against online frauds and formulating robust e-commerce policies.
Paving way into the Brazilian e-commerce market to sell personal care products has been challenging, however, with improvement initiatives slowly gaining momentum, the market is on an upswing to witness a stellar growth.