D2C Skincare Store

The brand was selling well, but mostly on other companies’ platforms. It had grown on marketplaces, where every order paid a commission and the brand never learned who its customers were. Its own store ran on a heavy theme that loaded slowly on mid-range phones and mobile data, which is how most of its customers shopped.

The store couldn’t explain which product suited which skin, so new visitors either left or bought the wrong thing and didn’t return. Nothing brought customers back when a bottle ran out. Cash-on-delivery orders that were refused at the door travelled out and back at the brand’s cost. And every new launch or campaign page waited in a developer’s queue.

We started by listening, not designing. Three weeks of interviews with repeat customers, first-time buyers and the support team, along with a close read of marketplace reviews, gave us five clear findings.

• Customers shop by concern, not by product name. They arrive with acne, pigmentation, dryness or sensitivity, and want to know what will help.
• They read ingredients. Niacinamide, salicylic acid, ceramides and vitamin C are part of how they choose, and they want to know why each one is there.
• Uncertainty kills the first order. The most common support question was “which one is right for my skin?”
• Reorders happen when the bottle is nearly empty, and that is exactly when customers drift back to marketplaces out of habit.
• WhatsApp is where they want updates, not email.

The new store is a headless D2C storefront: a fast Next.js front end, with Shopify running products, carts and orders behind it. Pages are generated ahead of time and served from the edge, and images are resized for every screen, so the store stays quick on mobile data.

Customers can browse the way they think:

• By skin concern: acne and breakouts, pigmentation, dryness, sensitivity, dullness.
• By ingredient: a guide page for each key ingredient, explaining what it does, who it suits and which products contain it. These guides also answer the questions people type into search.
• By routine: a routine builder that arranges cleanser, treatment, moisturiser and sunscreen in the right order for morning and night.

Every product page leads with what the product does, for which concern, with which ingredients, and how to use it, before the price and the button. Reviews are collected from verified buyers after delivery and shown on the product they belong to.

A short skin quiz asks about skin type, main concerns, sensitivity, current routine and climate. Its answers, together with what each customer browses and buys, feed an AI recommendation engine that suggests the products and the routine that suit that customer.

Skincare needs guardrails, so the brand’s formulation team wrote rules that sit above the AI:

• strong actives are never suggested together for sensitive skin;
• sunscreen is always part of a routine that includes exfoliating acids;
• products for a concern the customer didn’t mention are never pushed as the main suggestion.

The AI decides what is most relevant, and the rules decide what is allowed. Recommendations improve as more customers buy, reorder and review.

Customers can turn any everyday product into a refill subscription, every 30, 45 or 60 days. They approve a UPI AutoPay mandate or save a card once, and the refill ships automatically.

A WhatsApp reminder arrives a few days before each refill, with one-tap options to ship it, skip it, pause the subscription or change the interval. Customers stay in control, so subscriptions feel like a convenience rather than a trap, and the brand gets regular orders that no longer leak back to marketplaces.

Checkout fits on one screen, with UPI, cards, wallets and cash on delivery. As the customer types their pincode, the store shows whether it delivers there and an estimated delivery date.

Cash-on-delivery orders are confirmed on WhatsApp before they ship. The customer confirms with one tap or switches to paying online in the same chat, and orders that are never confirmed are held. This cuts the parcels that travel out and back undelivered.

A shipping aggregator picks the courier for each order based on the pincode and delivery performance. Customers follow their order on a tracking page in the brand’s own design, with updates on WhatsApp from packed to delivered.

The marketing team edits the store themselves in Sanity, a headless CMS: landing pages, ingredient guides, bundles, launch pages and campaign banners. They build pages from ready-made blocks, preview every change before it goes live, and schedule launches to go live at a set time.

Search runs on Algolia and understands how customers actually type, including everyday words such as “pimple”, “tan” and “dark spots” alongside the product names.

The storefront is Next.js in TypeScript, deployed on Vercel. Shopify’s Storefront API supplies products, carts and checkout, and Shopify webhooks keep the store’s own PostgreSQL database in step with orders and subscriptions. That database also holds customer profiles, quiz answers and the data the recommendation engine learns from.

Razorpay handles payments and UPI AutoPay mandates, so card and bank details never touch the brand’s servers. A shipping aggregator handles courier allocation and tracking, and the WhatsApp Business API carries confirmations, reminders and delivery updates. Customers choose which messages they receive, and their choices are recorded.

Before launch, every old product, collection and page address was mapped to its new page with a permanent redirect, and titles, descriptions and structured data were carried across. Existing customers were invited first, on WhatsApp and email, with their order history waiting in their new accounts. Search and ad traffic followed once the store had settled.

Since launch, monthly releases have added new product lines, bundles and campaigns, most of them built by the marketing team without a developer.

The brand now sells directly to its customers on a fast, mobile-first store it owns, with its customer data in its own hands. New visitors are guided to the right product for their skin, regular customers reorder through subscriptions instead of marketplaces, and cash-on-delivery orders are confirmed before they ship. Campaigns go live the day they are planned.