A premium cosmetics marketplace in 9 European markets – Shopify Plus
Client: Baza Cosmetics
Industry: Beauty & Cosmetics / BeautyTech
Beauty & Cosmetics / BeautyTech
We work with cosmetics brands, manufacturers and beauty retailers that sell online. We build stores with detailed product pages, platforms that connect salons with clients, and catalogs ready for multi-market sales. We combine good UX, technology and integrations that make selling, customer service and business growth easier.
Our clients in beauty and cosmetics
Selling cosmetics online: from the product page to new markets
When selling cosmetics online, it's not just about how the store looks. Customers want to find the right product quickly, learn about its ingredients, effects and available variants, and then get through checkout without any trouble. That's why we design beauty e-commerce around products and buying decisions — with clear product pages, filtering, search and integrations that keep data in order across the whole sales ecosystem.
What gets built most often in beauty
At the heart of most projects is a store with a detailed product page: ingredients and intended use, size and shade variants, zoomable photos, customer reviews. Online stores like these are designed around search and the product page, not around a category catalog.
Another recurring topic is selling in several markets at once: language versions, currencies, different labeling requirements for ingredients, different couriers and payment methods. If the store architecture doesn't plan for this from the start, every new market means copying the store instead of adding configuration — and that doubles maintenance costs with every country.
Where implementations go wrong
The most common trap is a catalog maintained by hand in several places at once: the store, marketplaces, data feeds for partners. Stock levels and descriptions drift apart, and a customer orders a variant that isn't available. The fix is a single source of product data that every channel uses — for larger catalogs, that's a job for a PIM system.
For brands that combine their own sales with offers from salons and clinics, marketplace platforms are the natural next step — with separate seller accounts, commissions and settlements. That's a different project from a store: more roles, more settlements and content moderation that needs to be planned before the first partners join.
Case studies in beauty and cosmetics
„The most important outcome of our collaboration was the brand's visual identity — distinctive and consistent with what we wanted to communicate. The website and store mockups we received were polished down to the last detail, and the pace of delivery was impressive.”
Krzysztof Kornas — CEO, High Culture sp. z o.o.
Review from Clutch
The basics
What a salon really needs, and what a cosmetics brand needs
In this industry, two business models have completely different needs. A service salon lives by its calendar: bookings, reminders, treatment packages, each client's treatment history. A cosmetics brand lives by sales: the store, product variants, content, selling across several channels. In a salon, the biggest untapped potential isn't in taking bookings but in reducing no-shows and getting clients to come back. A text reminder the day before and a deposit for more expensive treatments do more than the best booking form — although for short treatments, a deposit can scare off more clients than it saves appointments. Treatment history lets you reach out when it actually makes sense, instead of sending one campaign to your entire list.
For a cosmetics brand, getting product data in order pays off faster than redesigning the store. For companies that do both, we advise against one system for everything.
How we work
How we approach beauty projects
We start by understanding the process and the problem the technology is meant to solve. We look at where there's manual work, duplicated data, customer service issues or limitations of the current system. Then we agree on the key features and integrations. For a salon, that might be bookings, payments and a CRM; for a cosmetics brand — a product catalog, e-commerce, PIM, logistics or multichannel sales.
On your side are the price list and treatment durations, or the product data, the cancellation rules and someone who knows how a day in the salon really goes. On our side are implementation, integrations and end-to-end testing.
The timeline depends on the number of services and resources (stations, equipment, staff) or the number of product variants. One station and ten services takes days; a chain of salons with different price lists is a different project.
Decisions
The decisions that most affect how full your schedule is
A deposit when booking. It clearly reduces no-shows — and it clearly reduces the number of bookings too. For long, expensive treatments it usually pays off; for short ones it can scare off more clients than it saves appointments.
Reminders — when and through which channel. A text message the day before works best, and it costs money. It's worth comparing the cost of the message with the value of the appointment it saves — for short treatments, the math doesn't always add up.
Whether clients can cancel on their own. Self-service cancellation increases the number of cancellations but also frees up slots in advance. That's usually better than a no-show without warning, but it's a decision worth making deliberately.
What not to do. Don't keep the schedule in the system and in a paper notebook at the same time. Don't send the same campaign to everyone if you have treatment history. And don't launch online booking without working out how long it takes to prepare a station between clients.
Scope
Beauty in nine countries at once
The Baza Cosmetics marketplace sells premium cosmetics from more than nine brands in nine European markets. Currencies, languages, prices and differences in how the offer is presented are handled in the Shopify Plus architecture rather than bolted on later: a shared catalog, localized content, and tax and shipping rules set per market — including a separate customs procedure for Switzerland. A tenth country then becomes a matter of configuration, not another project.
What we build
Stores, marketplaces and systems for the beauty industry
We build online stores and cosmetics marketplaces, booking systems, sales platforms and custom applications.
We also design features specific to the beauty industry: detailed product pages, filtering by ingredients and use, loyalty programs, subscriptions, customer accounts and integrations with PIM, CRM, payment and logistics systems.Multi-market
One platform, many markets
Growing international sales doesn't have to mean building a separate store for every country. We design platforms that use a shared product catalog while allowing content, prices, currencies, payments and shipping to be localized.
We took this approach with Baza Cosmetics, among others, where a single platform handles sales in nine European markets.FAQ
Questions we hear from the beauty industry
- We design and develop online stores, marketplaces, booking systems, CRMs, sales platforms and custom applications. We tailor the scope to the business model and the processes to be improved.
- Yes. We design e-commerce tailored to the specifics of cosmetics — including detailed product pages, variants, ingredients, filters, reviews and integrations with payments, logistics, PIM and CRM.
- Yes. Not every project requires building a solution from scratch. We can extend an existing platform, add new features, prepare integrations or help migrate to a different technology.
- Yes. We can design a booking system, client portal, CRM or a custom solution to streamline salon operations. If the business already uses an external booking system, we first check whether integrating it is a better fit than replacing it.
- Yes. We design solutions supporting multiple languages, currencies, payment methods and delivery options, accounting for differences between individual markets. An example is Baza Cosmetics — a Shopify Plus platform serving nine European markets.
- It depends on where the complexity lies. If the challenge is the number of markets, payments and logistics, a ready-made platform usually does the job and gets you to market faster — that's how we built the Baza Cosmetics marketplace operating across nine European markets. A custom store makes sense when the sales model, configurator or an integration without a ready-made connector goes beyond what the platform supports. We settle this in the first conversation, not after a month of analysis.
- Regulatory compliance is the brand's responsibility; our job is to make sure the store can store and display that data. In practice that means separate fields for the INCI list, volume, intended use, warnings and the responsible person's details — in multiple languages and updatable when the formula changes. If you have product documentation in another system, it can be connected rather than re-entered manually.
- Booksy stays where clients already know how to use it; duplicating the calendar leads to two diaries and double bookings. A custom system adds what a booking portal doesn't do: treatment records, a stock of cosmetics consumed per service, and staff settlement. We set the flow in one direction — bookings feed into the system, not the other way around.
Let's build digital products for your company together
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