Selfologi
Changing the Face of Cosmetic Treatment
From Concept to Launch in a Matter of Months
Selfologi is the Shopify of cosmetic treatment, allowing customers to learn about and compare treatments before they book online and connecting them directly with the right clinic and staff. Being able to deliver this service digitally was a matter of finding the right technology partner.
ChallengeCosmetic treatment is an extremely fragmented market with high search volumes. Consumers were struggling to find a single source of truth that would answer their many questions, let alone book treatment. And the plethora of websites with varying degrees of quality, authenticity and credibility only made the search more complex and unsatisfactory. To build a modern eCommerce platform combined with a full B2B ecosystem that would solve this problem for both customers and practitioners, selfologi needed to overcome the following challenges:
- Finding a technology stack that could deliver agile content management, eCommerce tools and functionality plus site search and recommendation
- Catering for as-yet-unknown SKUs (stock keeping units) as the selfologi site was designed to sell third-party products, with no direct control of supply chain or logistics
- Allowing clinics to manage their calendars, available hours, bookings, pricing, discounts and payments
Solution
Using Amplience’s unified platform for commerce content, which includes Dynamic Content, Dynamic Media and Content Hub, selfologi was able to take advantage of a hierarchies feature in Amplience to create a dynamic sitemap and frontend navigation. This allowed the company to quickly build and soft-launch the site in a matter of months, growing an audience, generating leads and building Google rankings before the official launch. And the headless CMS from Amplience meant the team could easily develop images, videos and analytic workflows to create smart product pages designed to deliver outstanding customer experiences. The structured content is linked to the commerce experience powered by commerceTools, with all written content directly linking to the marketplaces so customers can view, select and book from the list of clinics and practitioners offering treatments. All clinics, practitioners, treatments and prices have been indexed and made available using Algolia to link to eCommerce content in commerceTools and CMS content supported by Amplience. To drive the customer marketplace, a bespoke B2B platform was built to provide an easy interface for clinics and practitioners to manage their treatments and bookings. Grid Dynamics built a pre-defined and structured product taxonomy that guarantees standardization of product terminology for customers and enables thousands of treatment variants to be offered.ResultsSelfologi has grown from a start-up online brand to appearing in millions of searches since it went live, thanks to its content-led approach with AmplienceFrom initial discovery to launching the first phase of the site with a content-led approach took just seven months. This accelerated lead generation ahead of the commercial launch and maximised SEO optimization.
- The ability to build a new audience from scratch, deliver an outstanding customer experience and support a B2B commerce offer is due to the fully composable approach of the tech stack deployed at the start
- The features within Amplience have allowed selfologi to focus on presenting content that helps customers to get answers to their cosmetic treatment questions and connect them with practitioners they can trust
- Daily changes - including small features, large features and feature toggles - have kept content constantly fresh and engaging
- Streamlined processes allow the development team to progress with multiple workstreams, test and go live smoothly and without delay
- The success of the site has driven triple-digit rates across key eCommerce metrics and allowed customers to confidently book cosmetic treatments online for the first time
How Amplience Made the Difference
Content was central to helping selfologi achieve its ambitions to be an educational hub that could answer questions and steer customers to the right provider for their cosmetic treatment needs. Amplience’s ease of use allowed selfologi to efficiently manage its images and content and adapt quickly once the site went live. By being able to access a consolidated process from creation to delivery, selfologi could try new approaches and test them quickly, so it can now deploy changes multiple times a week. This has been essential to how the platform has evolved as it responds to both customer and practitioner feedback. Amplience has become an essential element in the structured taxonomy of selfologi. From day one, all SKUs and products were categorized consistently so they could be linked to content via Amplience through APIs (application programming interfaces). This joined up experience means that customers can see an article in Arabic on hydrafacials, for example, select to translate it into English and then link to the relevant treatments from practitioners listed on the site, before making a booking. While selfologi could have opted to use a monolithic commerce system - which would have allowed it to enhance its new site, by using a MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-Native and Headless) approach it has had the flexibility to iterate rapidly and be efficient at scale. Since March 2022 product deployments have averaged twice weekly.“
Amplience helps us to be flexible and, without that, our launch would have been a different story. We have developed our online brand quickly and successfully… It’s partly strategy and planning but it’s the tech stack that allows it to happen.”
Rob Pye
CEO, Selfologi
Changing the Face of Cosmetic Treatment
How Selfologi Went from Concept to Launch in a Matter of Months
Selfologi CEO Rob Pye sat down with Amplience CEO and founder James Brooke to discuss how his brand was able to build a modern eCommerce platform and quickly enter the cosmetic market using a headless CMS from Amplience.
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