Cedric van Dijken, co-owner of Care for Skin, launched a webshop with skin care products and make-up, mainly to explore the possibilities to transition into online sales. For the first few years, it was mainly a nice addition to his mother's beauty salon. Once Cedric graduated, he decided to dedicate himself fulltime to Care for Skin. "Recently, we processed our hundred thousandth order."
In the closing months of 2011, the shop went live with approximately fifty products. Six months later, the product range had already doubled. Today, Care for Skin offers more than four thousand products from up to fifty brands. "In a relatively short period of time, we have grown into the online specialist in the field of skin care," says Cedric, who now manages a team of fifteen people.
‘Hundreds of orders a day’
The main intention for Care for Skin was to make it easy for customers of the beauty salon to order their regular products online. In addition, Cedric was curious what else would be possible online in this specific niche. This turned out to be more substantial than he had expected. "Right now, we process hundreds of orders every day and grow by significant percentages on an annual basis".
Recently, Care for Skin reached an important milestone, selling their hundred thousandth order. The majority of these orders come from our own country, with about five percent of our total being ordered by Belgian consumers. To manage the payments, the company uses MultiSafepay. "At first we collaborated with another payment provider, but MultiSafepay was able to offer us a higher level of service.”
‘We are very happy with the proactive approach from MultiSafepay.’
First thing Cedric noticed after the switch was the proactive approach by MultiSafepay, "I primarily expected the initial phase to be contact intensive, but working together with MultiSafepay means I speak to my account manager every two to three months."
He says that subjects vary, for example, improving conversion has been brought up, while another time the focus is on payment options. "At our old provider we only had Bancontact, now we can also offer KBC, ING Homepay and Belfius to Belgians, a world of difference.”
‘Our conversion directly reflected our changes’
Cedric is very pleased with the initiatives to increase conversion. "In addition to the various conversion tools you can use yourself, our account manager regularly examines how we can perform even better.” Cedric tells us, for example, that she finds out how many percent of the visitors who click on a certain payment method actually complete the order.
This data is compared to a benchmark, making it clear whether you are performing better or worse than average. "When our account manager advised us to change the layout because it would be clearer, we immediately noticed improvements in our conversion”.
From top 3 to market leadership
At the moment Care for Skin claims to have a top 3 position. Cedrics aims to be the Dutch market leader for high quality skin care products, within three years. Current roadmap to achieve this is not by branching out and selling through as many sales channels as possible, but by focusing solely on the Care for Skin webshop.
The reason that Care for Skin sells its products exclusively through its own channel is mainly due to the high level of service that the company strives for. "When buying from us you get advice from experienced beauticians. The reason behind this is very simple: if you use a product that is not suitable for your skin type, you will never get the desired result". Cedric also wants to prevent external sales channels from damaging the brand reputation.
By working together closely, we at MultiSafepay strive to help all our partners achieve their goals. In the case of Care for Skin, it was apparent that fine-tuning the payment environment was an important part of our service, so we focused on that.
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