2016/2017 Edition Beauty and the E-Commerce Beast As online sales of beauty and personal care products rise, loyalty becomes elusive, creating new challenges for beauty sellers. Beauty and the E-Commerce Beast 2017 A Trifecta of Trends Transforming the Industry A perfect storm of demographics, social media, and radical change in consumer attitudes toward shopping is forcing the beauty and personal care industry to play by a new set of rules. In 2015, the industry that built its historic success on providing consumers with the in-store opportunity to touch, smell, and sample products saw $6.2 billion, or almost 8 percent, of its sales take place online. This is a full 1 percent higher than in 2013. A.T. Kearney’s latest study of online beauty and personal care shoppers—our third since 2012— found that consumers are unwilling to accept the beauty business as usual and are increasingly attracted to digital alternatives (see sidebar: About the Study). This isn’t automatically good news. We found that while online sales are on the rise, they aren’t necessarily accompanied by commensurate levels of loyalty. In fact, in our 2016 survey, 67 percent of the respondents reported using four or more websites to fulfill their beauty and personal care browsing and shopping needs. 67 percent of our survey respondents report using four or more websites to fulfill their beauty and personal care shopping needs. The industry’s role as an unchallengeable authority as information source is also under attack from “Influencers”—the typically young, digitally plugged-in beaut