Commerce engineering for beauty brands

Shopify, Magento and Adobe Commerce, WooCommerce, and headless storefronts on Next.js, chosen by range size, scale and roadmap rather than preference. Beauty brings a specific requirement worth checking early: if you sell subscriptions or replenishment, the platform’s handling of recurring billing and its ecosystem for it varies considerably, and retrofitting subscriptions onto a platform that treats them as an afterthought is expensive. We establish whether recurring revenue is part of the plan before recommending a platform rather than after. We also check where your range is heading, since a brand adding shades, sizes or bundles quickly can outgrow a platform that felt comfortable at launch, and migrating later costs far more than choosing correctly now.

Yes. We build shade finders, skin and hair type quizzes, routine builders and recommendation engines on current model stacks including Claude. Shade matching is the highest value application in beauty because colour uncertainty drives both abandoned baskets and returns. The honest limitation is that matching from user submitted photographs is affected by lighting and camera differences, so we design it to give a confident range with an easy exchange rather than a single definitive answer, and we are careful not to imply a precision the technology cannot reliably deliver.

Yes. We connect payment providers, shipping carriers, marketplaces and tax systems so orders, fulfilment and settlements stay in step without manual work. Beauty adds a wrinkle around shipping that is worth raising early: some formulations are classed as restricted goods for air freight, which affects carrier options and international shipping rules. We build operations to be idempotent so a retried webhook cannot duplicate an order, make failed syncs replayable, and surface discrepancies in a report rather than leaving them for a customer to discover.

Yes, and they are connected because beauty is an image heavy, mobile dominated category. We build against the Core Web Vitals thresholds, Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1 at the 75th percentile. Google and Deloitte measured a 0.1 second improvement lifting retail conversion by 8.4 percent and average order value by 9.2 percent. Most practical gain comes from image handling, reducing third party scripts and fixing what is broken on mobile. We test the real purchase journey on mid range phones rather than only in a desktop browser, because the friction that actually costs orders appears in checkout on a modest device over mobile data.

You do, completely. You receive clean, documented, well structured code and full ownership of everything we build, held in your own repositories from the first commit rather than transferred at the end. There is no proprietary framework you can only maintain through us and no arrangement where you keep paying to use what you commissioned. If you later bring the work in house or move to another agency you should be able to do so without asking our permission or unpicking a dependency on us.

Most beauty stores go live in six to fourteen weeks depending on range size, custom features and integrations. A focused theme build or straightforward replatform can be faster, while a headless or heavily customised store takes longer, and we share a clear timeline before starting. Where shade matching, quizzes or subscriptions are involved, those add time beyond the storefront itself because each needs its own data model and testing, so we scope them as distinct workstreams rather than folding them into a general estimate.

Cost depends on scope, platform and the integrations and AI features involved. We scope every project to your goals and budget, then give a fixed proposal with no surprises, usually within 24 hours of your enquiry. In beauty the largest variables are usually subscription billing and any shade or diagnostic tooling, rather than the number of page templates. We will say when a requirement is disproportionately expensive relative to the revenue it is likely to produce, since deciding what to leave out is often the more valuable conversation.

That is the goal every time, and the method decides the outcome. We map every existing URL to its destination as a one to one redirect plan rather than pointing old pages at the homepage, preserve titles, descriptions and structured data, and migrate product, customer and subscription data with reconciliation rather than a raw dump. Active subscriptions need particular care during migration, since a billing relationship broken in transit is a churn event. We then monitor Search Console daily for the first thirty days.

Yes. We build iOS and Android shopping applications with personalised feeds, push notifications for launches and replenishment reminders, loyalty and fast checkout, connected to the same backend as your store. Beauty is one of the categories where an application can genuinely justify itself, because replenishment gives customers a real reason to return regularly and a reminder at the right moment converts well. We would still check your repeat purchase rate first, since an application without repeat behaviour behind it gets uninstalled within weeks.

Yes, and it needs designing for rather than hoping. We architect for peak load with edge caching, queueing for checkout and horizontally scalable infrastructure, then load test against realistic launch volumes rather than average traffic. Inventory logic that prevents overselling matters just as much, because when a creator video drives hundreds of simultaneous purchases of a limited product, cancelling confirmed orders costs more goodwill than the sale was worth. We rehearse the launch beforehand rather than discovering the ceiling during it. Where a launch is genuinely large we can add a waiting room so traffic enters the checkout at a controlled rate, which protects the experience for everyone rather than letting the whole queue degrade at once.

Yes. Every build includes thirty days of post launch support, and beyond that we continue with monitoring, security patching, updates, new features and ongoing conversion and SEO work, so the store improves launch after launch. You get one senior team for the build and the growth rather than a handover into silence. For Magento and Adobe Commerce stores, scheduled patching matters more than teams assume: Sansec found roughly 75 percent of stores still unpatched a week after the CosmicSting fix, CVE-2024-34102, was published.

Batch and expiry tracking is modelled properly where you need it, so stock rotates correctly and you can trace a batch if a quality issue arises, which matters for both operations and regulatory response. On claims, the storefront is where compliance is most often breached inadvertently: cosmetic advertising claims are regulated in most markets, and copy that strays into medicinal or therapeutic language creates genuine exposure. We build the content structure to keep claims consistent and reviewable rather than scattered across product descriptions nobody has audited since launch.