Dermalogica is one of the most recognizable names in skincare. The company was founded in 1986 by Jane Wurwand, who wanted to give people the skills and opportunity to pursue a profession in skin health. Today, Dermalogica is both an education and product company - offering consumer-based products to skincare therapists to use during their treatments and for their clients to use at home.
Frustrated by the lack of basic functionality and flexibility of their previous custom-built B2B sales platform, Dermalogica Canada turned to Shopify to manage all the complexity and customization that they needed in order to improve their business and customer experience.
Since migrating their B2B business to Shopify, Dermalogica Canada has seen:
- 3x increase in reorder frequency
- 23% increase in conversion rate
- 75% of customers rate the buyer experience as a 4 out of 5 or higher
Before migrating to Shopify, Dermalogica ran their B2B business on a custom-built platform that allowed customers to place orders, but not much else. The platform’s outdated interface, poor search functionality, and impossible to manage merchandising would often lead to customers phoning in their orders to avoid using the platform all together.
“The platform didn’t yield well to make a conversion. It kind of blocked you at every step,” said Nicholas Lachhman, Dermalogica’s Associate Ecommerce Manager. They kept using the platform because of its tight-knit integration with their ERP. But while it facilitated sales in a literal sense, it didn’t give them any analytics that their sales team could use to increase the frequency, value, or personalization of orders.
As Dermalogica’s need for new functionality and features grew, their platform couldn’t keep up. New features, when they were even possible, took painfully long to build. “If we would ask for a feature, it would take a couple days for the developers to respond. And then a couple of weeks for them to make a subtle change,” Nicholas added.
The custom platform was also plagued by constant downtime that frustrated customers and caused countless abandoned sales.”The downtime was a lot more than you would want it to be. It would go down for a couple of days once or twice a month,” said Nicholas.
Frustrated at the amount of wasted time and lost sales, Dermalogica began looking for a B2B ecommerce platform that could integrate just as well with their ERP, but offer them much more in terms of functionality and flexibility. They were pleasantly surprised to discover that Shopify, who they’d used for years to manage the DTC side of their business, could handle the complexities of B2B too.
We did a lot of research into B2B platforms. Do they meet what our current accounts are accustomed to? Does it get rid of the pain points of our current platform? And is it expandable for the future? And out of the gate Shopify’s B2B solution gave us confidence that it was the best choice out there.
For Dermalogica, the migration meant a dramatic improvement in the buying experience for B2B customers. It allowed them to create a buying experience that let B2B customers shop in a way that was more effortless and familiar while still allowing them to integrate all the individual complexities of their B2B business. There was no need to onboard new customers - they just used Dermalogica’s online store to place B2B orders the same way they do for their personal shopping.
There’s a ton of research that Shopify has clearly done throughout the course of its history and they understand what consumers are looking for, and I think it’s obviously translated to the B2B product.
Shopify’s intuitive and easy to use platform allowed them to migrate their B2B business using just a single developer to fully customize their store’s look and functionality to their exact specifications. And API access and custom coding allowed them to easily add the unique features like the loyalty-based pricing model that their business thrives on.
“There’s a ton of Shopify developers out there that are already familiar with the platform, so it’s incredibly easy to add features and customizations,” Sara Assenza said of the development process.
Shopify’s native features helped Dermalogica drive sales from the get-go. The staff permissions feature allowed them to bring all of their sales representatives onto a single platform and give them selective access to place and manage orders and view order history to help them drive sales. And they vaulted credit cards to let customers check out faster without having to re-enter their card information.
The overall result was an easy, familiar, buying experience that B2B customers loved and a powerful and intuitive back end that made managing the store, customers, and orders easier for staff.
After migrating to Shopify, Dermalogica saw an instant change in how easily and often their customers were able to place orders. The team said that the new store’s ease-of-use played a major role in increasing the frequency of repeat B2B orders by 3x - from 46.9 days to 10.7 days.
Once they have placed the orders, automatic email updates allow customers to track their orders from placement to delivery, cutting down on customer service and giving customers more confidence in placing orders.
Not only did customers order more frequently, but they also converted more often. Dermalogica’s B2B conversion rates increased from 74.4% to 91.5% after the migration. The brand believes a lot of this increase has to do with how flexible and customizable the platform is, allowing them to clearly and beautifully merchandise products on the back end, and for customers to easily find what they’re looking for on the front end.
“Customers used to be so frustrated by our platform that they’d rather call us on the phone to place orders. Now we’re seeing customers be so comfortable with the experience that they’re placing orders for thousands of dollars worth of product from their mobile phones,” Nicholas told us of the shift.
But beyond the empirical improvements, choosing Shopify has given Dermalogica the confidence that they’ll always be at the forefront of innovation in ecommerce for both sides of their business.
“To us, Shopify represents ease of use, scalability, and flexibility. We’re seeing ease of use and insights in the back end. And we’re seeing the same ease of use on the front end with the customer experience. Shopify is able to deliver on both of those, and not a lot of platforms can say that,” Sara said.
Moving to Shopify has been a pivotal moment for Dermalogica Canada. Not only were we the first to market within the greater organization, but through our early adoption, we have become a basis for other markets to look at Shopify as a viable B2B option. One thing we can be confident in is that we can grow with Shopify as the platform evolves, which gives us peace of mind knowing our technology stack is future-proofed.