10 Easy Steps to Launch Your Beauty Products Brand with D2C Shopify Alternative StoreHippo

If the phenomenal growth of eCommerce and the success of indigenous D2C beauty brands like Mamaearth and Sugar Cosmetics have inspired you to start your own journey, you’re in the right place. The beauty industry in India is thriving, and with the right strategy and platform, your brand could be the next big thing. Whether you're aiming to offer natural skincare, sustainable makeup, or innovative beauty products, launching your D2C beauty brand has never been more exciting—or achievable! 

Growth of Indian D2C Beauty Brands

Here are some native beauty businesses that have performed exceptionally well:

• Mamaearth: Achieved unicorn status in 2022 with a valuation of over $1.2 billion. In FY24, Mamaearth's revenue was Rs 19,696 million, a 30% increase from FY23. Over the past five years, Mamaearth's revenue has grown at a CAGR) of 103.8%.(Source: Inc42).
• Sugar Cosmetics: Grew by 70% in FY21, recording a revenue of ₹200 crore (Source: Forbes India). By January 2024, Sugar cosmetics crossed the Rs. 500 Cr revenue mark.
• Plum: Grew 2.5x in revenue over 2020, with a revenue of ₹110 crore in FY21. Plum reached the Rs 350 crore revenue run rate by  the end of 2023–2024 financial year. (Source: Inc42).

The figures underline how these homegrown D2C beauty brands have successfully capitalized on the trend and are tapping into the growing demand for natural, sustainable, and locally made beauty products. With the right ecommerce platform to power their venture, Indian D2C beauty brands can easily establish a strong online presence and compete in the booming eCommerce space.

Why Indian Beauty Brands Need a D2C Shopify Alternative Like StoreHippo

Indian beauty brands are growing rapidly, but many face limitations with platforms like Shopify. To scale effectively and meet local market needs, StoreHippo offers a more tailored solution as a D2C Shopify alternative for beauty brands in India. 

Here’s why StoreHippo stands out:

• Mobile-first approach ensures a seamless shopping experience for India’s mobile-centric audience.
• Built-in multilingual and multi-currency support helps brands cater to diverse regional audiences and expand globally.
• Zero coding, plug-and-play setup make launching and managing your store effortless.
• Inbuilt marketing tools like SEO, social media, and email marketing help beauty brands boost their visibility.
• Advanced personalization features allow targeted customer experiences based on preferences.
• Customizable themes and designs offer flexibility to match your brand’s aesthetic without limitations.
• Support for diverse business models enables your beauty brand to experiment with new business models.

StoreHippo is the ideal D2C Shopify alternative that provides everything beauty brands need to thrive in India’s dynamic market.

10-Step Process to Launch a D2C Beauty Brand with Shopify Alternative StoreHippo

With its advanced technology, inherent scalability and support for diverse business models, StoreHippo offers comprehensive solutions to businesses planning to disrupt the D2C beauty products market.

Here a step-by-step process to launch your beauty brand with StoreHippo:

1. Define Your Niche and Target Audience

Before launching your D2C beauty brand, the first step is to define your niche and target audience. Are you focusing on skincare, makeup, organic beauty, or perhaps a unique offering like eco-friendly, sustainable products? Having a clear niche helps you fine-tune everything from your product range to your brand’s messaging and marketing approach. Knowing exactly who you're catering to and who your competitors are also shaping how you speak to your audience and what kind of shopping experience you offer.

How StoreHippo Helps

StoreHippo, as a powerful D2C Shopify alternative, makes this process easier with its flexible customization options and 300+ built-in enterprise grade features. With StoreHippo’s, you can design your site, personalize product recommendations, and implement targeted marketing strategies—all based on the specific needs and preferences of your audience and niche. The ease of use and a host of built in features give you the freedom to create, innovate and establish your D2C beauty brand as a market leader.

2. Create a Unique Brand Identity

Your brand identity—logo, colors, packaging, and messaging—should resonate with your audience and authentically represent your D2C beauty brand’s values. Consistency is key. From your website to social media channels, every touchpoint should clearly reflect your brand’s ethos and engage your audience in a meaningful way.

How StoreHippo Helps

As a top Shopify alternative for Indian enterprises, StoreHippo offers flexible, customizable themes and a drag-and-drop editor that makes it easy to create a visually appealing storefront. For businesses that require advanced customization, StoreHippo’s developer-friendly interface allows you to directly edit HTML, customize widgets, adjust slider timings, or modify action buttons. This combination of ease and advanced control lets you tailor every aspect of your online store to match your beauty brand’s identity and provide a unique shopping experience.

3. Set Up Your Online Store

With your brand identity solidified, the next step is to build your online store. If you're launching a direct-to-consumer beauty products brand, StoreHippo makes the process seamless. You can create a fully-functional eCommerce website in minutes, complete with all the features needed to support your business—from product listings to secure payment gateways.

How StoreHippo Helps

As a leading Shopify alternative, StoreHippo provides a 360-degree D2C eCommerce solution with over 300 built-in features. This includes everything you need to run a comprehensive beauty products store, such as inventory management, multiple payment gateways, shipping integrations, and more. Your teams can easily manage the end-to-ed business without any training. Uploading new catalogs and updating inventory and prices is also a smooth process with support for bulk uploaded and updates. StoreHippo’s platform ensures your direct-to-consumer beauty brand has all the tools to scale efficiently and build a strong foothold in the booming ecommerce market.

4. Add and Manage Products

Start by adding your beauty products to your D2C beauty brand’s online store, organizing them into categories like skincare, makeup, haircare, or organic beauty. Make sure to include high-quality images, detailed product descriptions, ingredients, and usage tips to help customers make informed choices. This not only enhances the shopping experience but also builds trust in your brand.

How StoreHippo Helps

As a powerful Shopify alternative for Indian enterprises, StoreHippo’s robust product management tools make handling large inventories simple. You can easily manage multiple variants such as shades, sizes, and textures. Its inbuilt tools streamline inventory tracking and reordering, ensuring your D2C beauty brand stays organized and can meet customer demand efficiently. With the hierarchical categories you can list products in different categories and make it easy for your buyers to navigate through your site and find the desired products. StoreHippo also gives you a 360-degree product view feature to add product images and videos so your D2C beauty brand’s buyers can make informed purchasing decisions.

5. Optimize for Mobile Commerce

With over 80% of consumers shopping for beauty products on their mobile phones, adopting a mobile-first approach is crucial for any D2C beauty brand. Your store must be optimized for mobile devices to provide a seamless, fast, and engaging shopping experience, ensuring that customers can browse and purchase products effortlessly on the go. You need to build your brand’s mobile apps as well as have a PWA store to reach buyers beyond tier I and II cities.

How StoreHippo Helps

As one of the top D2C Shopify alternatives, StoreHippo is designed with a mobile-first architecture. All stores powered by StoreHippo are Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) which makes it easy for buyers in tier III+ cities to connect and purchase from your beauty brand even on slow internet connections. StoreHippo also has a built-in mobile apps builder which enables you to create fully functional apps for both Android and iOS at no additional cost. This ensures your D2C beauty brand connects with buyers across multiple touchpoints and offers an optimized mobile shopping experience, increasing customer engagement and sales.

6. Implement Personalization and Customization

Beauty shoppers love personalized recommendations that cater to their preferences and past purchases. By adding a touch of personalization to your D2C beauty brand’s website, you can significantly boost customer engagement and drive conversions. Offering tailored product recommendations, exclusive offers and dynamic pricing creates a more engaging and relevant shopping experience.

How StoreHippo Helps

As a leading Shopify alternative for Indian enterprises, StoreHippo ensures your brand has all the tools and features to offer multi level personalisation to your buyers. StoreHippo’s headless architecture gives your marketing and development teams better flexibility and creative control to build personalised buyer journeys. You can create different landing pages for different buyer groups or create sub-stores for different product lines and geographies. You can further personalise by offering unique store designs for each buyer segment and offering unique discount codes with the built-in blog engine. You can also seamlessly integrate with your preferred third-party tools to offer a seamless personalized shopping experiences. You can effortlessly implement features like dynamic pricing, personalized product recommendations, and custom offers, all tailored to individual customer profiles. This level of personalization not only enhances customer satisfaction but also helps your D2C beauty brand stand out in a competitive market.

7. Set Up Secure Payments and Shipping

A seamless checkout process is essential to reducing cart abandonment and enhancing customer satisfaction. Ensure your D2C beauty brand offers multiple payment options, including credit/debit cards, UPI, digital wallets, and EMI, to cater to diverse customer preferences. Additionally, provides a variety of shipping options to guarantee quick, reliable deliveries that meet customer expectations.

How StoreHippo Helps

As a versatile Shopify alternative, StoreHippo comes pre-integrated with over 60 payment gateways and 30 logistics partners. This ensures a smooth and secure checkout process while offering flexible shipping solutions. Whether you're exploring D2C Shopify alternatives or looking for an all-in-one platform, StoreHippo enables efficient product delivery at optimized costs, helping you enhance the overall shopping experience for your customers.

8. Create an Omnichannel Presence

In today’s digital-first landscape, where buyers browse through 4-6 touchpoints on an average before making a purchase decision, establishing an omnichannel presence is vital for any D2C beauty brand. Engaging customers across platforms— D2C store, apps, PWA stores, social media, marketplaces, and even physical stores—ensures your brand is accessible wherever your audience shops. This not only strengthens your customer relationships but also broadens your reach.

How StoreHippo Helps

As a Shopify alternative for Indian enterprises, StoreHippo excels in supporting omnichannel retailing. With its unified APIs, you can manage sales across multiple channels, online stores, mobile apps, social media, offline stores, and marketplaces, all from a single backend. Using the decoupled headless architecture you can also add new touchpoints using the same backend logic and APIs. This allows your D2C beauty brand to create a seamless shopping experience across every platform, maximizing your visibility and customer engagement.

9. Launch a Marketing Strategy

A robust marketing strategy is essential for driving traffic to your D2C beauty brand’s website. To effectively reach your target audience, use a mix of SEO, social media, email marketing, and influencer collaborations. These tactics not only attract new customers but also help build long-term engagement and loyalty.

How StoreHippo Helps

As one of the top D2C Shopify alternatives, StoreHippo simplifies marketing with built-in SEO tools and marketing features. With StoreHippo your brand gets customizable meta tags and a host of other SEO features like canonical URLs, sitemap, redirects etc. This helps boost your search engine rankings and brand visibility. Additionally, StoreHippo offers powerful marketing features like discount engines, blogs, abandoned cart follow up, seamless social media integrations and automated notifications, enabling your D2C beauty brand to engage and retain customers efficiently while driving consistent traffic to your store.

10. Measure, Analyze, and Scale

Once your D2C beauty brand is live, it's crucial to track your store’s performance and analyze customer behavior. By using data analytics, you can fine-tune your marketing strategies, introduce new products, and identify areas for improvement. This data-driven approach helps you scale your business efficiently and stay ahead in the competitive beauty market.

How StoreHippo Helps

As a leading Shopify alternative, StoreHippo provides in-depth analytics and reporting tools that give you valuable insights into your sales, customer engagement, and inventory management. StoreHippo gives you a complete snapshot of your orders, bestselling products, the markets that are garnering most orders, and more. You can also integrate with popular analytics tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, etc to get in-depth insights about your business. Alternatively, StoreHippo also integrates seamlessly with your chosen analytics tools. These features enable you to make informed decisions, optimize your store's performance, and strategically grow your D2C beauty brand with ease.

Conclusion

Launching a beauty products brand online demands an ecommerce platform that provides flexibility, scalability, and robust eCommerce tools to fuel your D2C growth. With StoreHippo, you get a Shopify alternative designed to cater to the unique needs of your D2C beauty brand. Its mobile-first architecture, seamless integrations, extensive customization options, and omnichannel capabilities make launching and scaling your brand effortless. 

StoreHippo’s plug and play solutions make it a popular D2C Shopify alternative with host of built-in features- from advanced marketing tools to in-depth analytics that ensure your business is ready to meet the dynamic demands of the beauty industry. By choosing StoreHippo, you’re positioning your brand for long-term success, with the agility to adapt and thrive in the ever-evolving eCommerce landscape.

Ready to take your D2C beauty brand to the next level? Launch your D2C business with StoreHippo, and start your 14-day free trial today!