Beauty emerges as top customer acquisition category on Amazon India

Beauty has become Amazon India's biggest customer acquisition engine, fuelled by rising demand from non-metro consumers

Beauty has emerged as the largest category driving customer acquisition on Amazon India, with the segment growing 25-30 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y) in gross merchandise sales, said Siddharth Bhagat, director of Amazon Beauty India.

 

In an exclusive conversation with Business Standard, Bhagat said that a majority of customers make their first-ever purchase on the platform through beauty products. “One of the biggest reasons why beauty as a segment is extremely important for Amazon is that it is the largest customer acquisition driver for the company. Beauty’s ability to acquire a new customer for Amazon is the largest. The other big thing is that customers who actually buy beauty products end up becoming loyal customers for the longest period of time,” Bhagat said.

 

The e-commerce platform is gearing up to host Beautyverse, its flagship beauty discovery event, on Saturday (June 20). Bhagat said that brands that participated in the earlier editions of Beautyverse witnessed nearly 1.66x growth in sales month-on-month.

 

Amazon currently hosts more than 400,000 beauty brands on its marketplace and plans to onboard over 100 premium brands this year. Bhagat said the company is seeing strong demand for international segments, with Korean beauty and French pharmacy products growing twofold Y-o-Y, while West Asian fragrances have nearly trebled.

 

Given that the country’s beauty market is expected to reach around $40 billion by 2029-30, Bhagat said global brands increasingly view India as one of their fastest-growing markets. He added that Amazon has recently expanded its portfolio with Japanese beauty brands, Australian beauty labels, and premium skincare offerings such as La Roche-Posay.

 

According to Bhagat, the growth in the beauty category is largely driven by rising sales in non-metro markets. “Most of our growth is coming from non-metro cities. Especially in the premium beauty segment, more than 50 per cent of the growth came from Tier-II and beyond, which includes places like Thrissur (Kerala), Ranchi (Jharkhand), Jalandhar (Punjab), and more.”

 

Bhagat added that increasing awareness driven by content creators and improved access to products have unlocked demand beyond metropolitan centres. “The aspiration of the people was always there, and now because of our reach to 100 per cent of pincodes, this access problem is getting solved.”

 

As Amazon doubles down on its quick commerce offering (Amazon Now) and same-day delivery, the company said it is currently delivering more than 50 per cent of orders in the beauty category within a day to consumers across the country.

 

Amazon is also integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into beauty discovery through Rufus, its AI-powered shopping assistant, which enables customers to search for products based on skin concerns, ingredients, and preferences.