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Using packaging to meet online health and beauty shopper expectations

Consumer packaging preferences were a key factor in online shopping of health and beauty products in 2000. That still rings true in 2018, according to a newly released study.

Consumer packaging preferences were a key factor in online shopping of health and beauty products in 2000. That still rings true in 2018.
Consumer packaging preferences were a key factor in online shopping of health and beauty products in 2000. That still rings true in 2018.

Way back in 2000, long before e-commerce became the red-hot topic it is today, Packaging World reported on reflect.com, an upstart company that began selling women’s cosmetics/beauty products not at retail, but—get this—on the Internet!

At that time, the process of ordering products online was not only unusual, but also, in the case of reflect.com, one that allowed the consumer to actually select packaging preferences. The potential disruption from e-commerce was so uncertain that PW’s late Editor and Packaging Hall of Fame inductee Arnie Orloski explained in a follow-up column, “The legend of Jimmi; an ode to cosmetics,” that “some members of the packaging community are right to be concerned about their futures.”

The column ended by saying, “In the future, Jim or ‘Jimmi’ [the fictitious name this editor created in order to create a personal beauty profile and order the packaged products at reflect.com] and other PW editors will continue to explore packaging-related changes that cyber marketers are making, from distribution packaging, labeling, custom packaging to shipping.”

Fast-forward 18 years and e-commerce growth continues to soar, with the prediction that it will account for 15% of all retail sales globally by 2025, according to Smithers Pira’s E-Pack Summit 2018. Financially speaking, that’s a leap from $28 billion to $55 billion by 2025.

Digital health and beauty product shoppers today don’t necessarily get to select their packaging as they did at reflect.com, but one thing made crystal clear in a new study released by Esko is that one-third of e-commerce shoppers return health and beauty products because of the packaging.

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