80% increase in direct-to-consumer sales, and a 10% ecommerce conversion rate

Avon’s rich history has been characterized by the success of its personalized 1-1 selling. The company has been synonymous with social selling, spearheading the concept of reps selling cosmetics directly to their personal connections. Over the last few years, online shopping has grown significantly, and for AVON this has meant adapting and enhancing its digital function, with a particular focus on replicating its personalized 1-1 selling model online.

Avon needed to give customers more choice and convenience in how they buy from them, whilst scaling direct-to-consumer sales.

Following a competitive pitching process, AVON appointed Shopify Plus partner agency, Velstar to lead the web design, development, and migration of its new custom Shopify Plus store.

Avon needed to improve product discovery by supercharging search 

After building a new website on Shopify Plus, the Avon team found the out-of-the-box search too basic and was not maximizing the huge potential of its search interactions. Ecommerce agency Velstar recommended Klevu as a way to help Avon improve product discovery, hugely important in the beauty sector.

Klevu’s world-class technology, easy-to-use interface, and plug-and-play integration with Shopify made it the ideal choice for Avon. 

Now, Avon can enjoy the freedom, flexibility, and speed of Shopify Plus, whilst its in-house team has time and resources available to focus on scaling the business.

• 80% increase in direct-to-consumer sales 
• AOV increased by 7.5% compared to 2020 on its previous platform
• Peak season sales are up by 30%
• 3x site speed increase 
• Search-led transactions increased by 11%
• 16% increase in per-session value
• Avon’s ecommerce conversion rate now sits at a very impressive 10%

About the build 

For the Shopify Plus development, Velstar implemented the designs as a custom Shopify theme using HTML, SCSS, JS/jQuery, and Liquid.

Velstar’s Technical Director, Barry Kilby, says of the build, “We wanted to keep the site build as simple as possible, so only JavaScript when necessary, and made use of semantic, clean markup with a focus on performance optimization. We integrated several third-party apps to improve functionality, including the product discovery app, and Klevu to supercharge customer search interactions and to help Avon convert more of its onsite search traffic. Furthermore, we integrated reviews and the UGC app, Yotpo to help cultivate a community of loyal fans and boost revenue using social proof.”

Due to the image-led nature of the site, Velstar focused heavily on lazy loading assets, and provided those assets in various sizes, so, for example, the site would load appropriately on mobile using images with smaller resolutions.

On the homepage, top-level collection categories are displayed to refine product offerings to each user. A flexible grid layout has been used so that the homepage would look great with any amount of content uploaded. It also gives Avon’s team the freedom to easily update the displays depending on the latest trends and product promotions.

Finally, at the heart of Avon’s sales operations are its sales representatives. So Velstar integrated a custom ‘become a rep’ functionality to make it easier for people to join Avon’s beauty community.

The Avon team is looking into Klevu’s Smart Category Merchandising solution next, with in-built A/B Testing, to help automatically rank products on its collection pages. Currently, Avon is relying on this manually and knows that the Klevu tool can provide a solution to this time-consuming issue, and ultimately personalize category pages to be in line with the intent of the customer.