The Face Shop’s face-lift with Stores increases their brand recognition, sales, and reach

Founded in 2003, the Face Shop (TFS) is a natural beauty brand headquartered in South Korea with a global presence of over 3,000 locations in 35 countries. The brand is heavily inspired by the outdoors and the notion that everyone possesses natural beauty. In 2022, in an effort to increase global awareness of their brand and products, TFS worked with Amazon Ads to highlight their natural ingredients and the elements of Korean skin care in their beauty products.

TFS wanted a way to help their global customers, professional women, shop their beauty product range, discover their featured deals, and learn about their brand story. Therefore, in 2022, they decided to focus on enhancing their Store in order to attract new and existing customers. TFS elevated their Store and activated it with Sponsored Brands ads and Posts, working with Amazon Ads creative services to receive support with design production and copywriting. The Amazon Ads team used creative experience, mixed with performance data and insights, to support UX and design decisions. Considering that new-to-brand (NTB) shoppers ^* who visit a Store are 25.6% more likely to purchase than those who do not visit a Store,¹ Amazon Ads proposed a Store redesign that uses the Store as a landing destination for NTB shoppers to explore, discover, and interact with their entire product offering.

The first steps for the Amazon Ads team involved creating an optimized shopping experience through their existing storefront. The key proponents of the TFS redesign included four overall recommendations that any brand may utilize to optimize their Store offering:

• Optimizing their content for a mobile-first design
• Using a shoppable image widget
• Adding rich lifestyle imagery and engaging videos
• Highlighting a clear unique selling proposition (USP) on the homepage

Amazon Ads wanted to maintain the brand’s messaging on natural ingredients with a clean Store page design. They adopted a color palette with earth tones to match their sophisticated look and product packaging. Sections with product images and clickable elements that followed this style were added to the layout. Above the fold, there were USPs highlighting brand’s product features, natural ingredients, and benefits, along with aesthetically pleasing background videos and product-focused videos on the homepage and subpages. To create an immersive shopping experience and to guide customers through the Store, the team added new pages for best-selling products and gift sets.

The optimized Store design encouraged shoppers to interact with TFS products by learning about their benefits in a meaningful way, as shoppers could explore educational materials to learn about extended TFS product categories, their natural ingredients, and how the brand addresses the various needs of diverse skin types.

The enhanced Store was published live in July 2022 and increased engagement with an uptick in performance metrics within three months after the optimization. The average dwell time increased by 24% (from 57 seconds pre-optimization to 70 seconds post-optimization), and bounce rate reduced from 15% pre-optimization to 9% post-optimization. The sponsored traffic saw an increase of 9% for clicks per page view and a 27% increase in units sold per visit. Additionally, with the combination of sponsored traffic and the Store optimization, the brand saw a 24% increase (+1,488) in Amazon followers, via the Follow button accessible on Stores.

After six months, the average dwell time increased by an additional 6% (from 70 seconds from three months post-optimization to 74 seconds from six months post-optimization). The reduced bounce rate remained steady at 9%.²

*New-to-brand customers are first-time customers of a brand on Amazon (No purchase history in the last 12 months on Amazon)