One Stop Beauty Online
Find best beauty products, at best prices (UK)
Today we had our first affiliate sale on OSBO. It was a small comission but a step in the right direction. Now to figure out how we can really increase those sales.
We have also launched our forum where we hope to build conversation around beauty products.
We were very excited about incorporating a Rewards Program, to encourage users to write reviews and invite friends, collecting points and getting a reward. Sadly, it doesn't seem like the program is working at all as we don't see any increased activity since Rewards Program launch :(
Spent last month making massive improvements in user experience on mobile devices.
We started implementing the user referral program, which eventually we're planning to incorporate into a site-wide rewards program.
Still battling the data... Doesn't seem there will be an easy solution for this.
After making significant changes to the UI, we asked friends&family for feedback again, and it was remarkably warmer, with many people saying that the new version looks great. We had a few people raise issues with mobile experience (we focused on desktop) and looking at various statistics, we decided that we cannot ignore this market and decided to spend some time addressing mobile experience.
Data feeds turned out terrible, and we're battling inconsistencies and inability to present the same product from multiple shops in one place.
August and September were very busy preparing for an international move. Then some time to settle in, with new country being very different to what we were used to. Overall, not a very productive period - but at least around this time we finally got access to the data feeds via affiliate programs so we thought things will finally start moving.
The project wasn't really going anywhere, and I was getting increasingly exhausted, working full time at demanding work, and then at home in the evenings and weekends. We had sort-of-MVP but we felt it looked terrible, didn't have enough data, we put it into indexing but that was all. We didn't promote it except for friends and family - feedback suggested that whilst the idea is good, the page does not feel "user-friendly".
Co-founder and I decided to start transition out of our jobs in order to focus on OSBO full time, at the same time relocating out of UK. We decided to do that in the autumn, to have time to prepare.
Evenings and weekends, as a Java developer in day job, I started to look into various front-end technologies. Tried to decide what should be the MVP scope, and started to see that one of the biggest challenges will be to get data. Applied for access to some affiliate networks to get data feeds and got rejected as I had no website to show. Chicken-and-egg, how am I supposed to build the website with no data?
Web scraping to the rescue...
I always found the process of finding beauty products very frustrating - reviews spread through tens of different places, often written by someone who has completely different needs than I do. This problem got particularly frustrating around my wedding, when I needed to find a few items for really reliable make-up. I couldn't understand why something like TripAdvisor-For-Beauty does not exist, a one-stop-shop where I could quickly see ratings and reviews, especially from other ladies with e.g. similar skin problems.
That's when I decided that perhaps it's time to build it - One Stop Beauty Online!
2 Comments
Congrats on the first affiliate sale! I'm currently leading a Product Feed project at FlexOffers.com and we could give you guys access to a ton of product catalog to major UK brands. Send me a note if you're interested so I can get you all set up - juan.gomez@flexoffers.com
That sounds great! Sending an email now :)