Glam Fairy

CH. 7 Business Marketing

 

Sephora is such a huge success mostly because of their business-to-business electronic commerce, Sephora turned to EPAM (NYSE:EPAM), a leading provider of complex software engineering solutions and a leader in IT service delivery to launch website.  This initiative builds a solid foundation for our partnership with Sephora, enabling us to deliver the next generation of cross-channel, user-centric e-commerce experiences," said Valeri Makovik, Vice President, Technology Solutions of EPAM Systems, and head of EPAM's E-Commerce Center. This new move by Sephora gives them the competitive advantage because this ecommerce website is the first of its kind.

An excellent interview from Brian Solis with Julie Bornstein SVP of Digital at Sephora

Sephora showed its stickiness on the web with staggering numbers, Sephora bills its website as the world's largest beauty store, with 13 million visitors each month. About 20 percent of that traffic comes from people browsing on their iPhones, Bornstein said, and sales through the iPhone have grown "in the triple digits" for the past two years. The iPad drives about half that much traffic to the online store, she said, but iPad users spend more money.

Sephora’s strategic alliance include J.C Penny ,while it’s positioned itself as the ultimate beauty expert, Sephora isn’t above aligning itself with leaders in other industries to strengthen its own brand position. The first major synergistic relationship it formed was with the J.C. Penney department store chain, creating a “store-within-a-store” retail concept that positions each Penney’s Sephora in the center core of the store, staffed by Sephora consultants. This offensive strategic move indicated the cosmetics giant wasn’t content to passively compete with the department-store cosmetics counter across the mall aisles,it was ready to invade and vanquish from within.

Loyalty isn't something that brands create, it's something that consumers grant based on trust.