DECODING MYNTRA'S PUSH TO SELL LIPSTICK AND BLUSH

The fashion e-tailing giant has added a second growth engine—beauty products. Should Nykaa be worried?

- Suneera Tandon

Recently, a colleague of mine started looking for lip colours. Her online searches took her to e-tailing giant Amazon, beauty retailer Nykaa and fashion platform Myntra-yes, the Flipkart group company also sells beauty products.

On Myntra, she zeroed in on a nude shade sold by MAC Cosmetics, an American cosmetics manufacturer, called 'Powder Kiss Lipstick. She loved playing with a 'virtual try-on' feature. That's a trial room of the online world where augmented reality and virtual reality technologies are used. Over live camera or through a selfie uploaded, one can check exactly how a shade looks and feels.

"Myntra's virtual try-ons are great and addictive; the platform is so well-stocked; the search results are intuitive," the colleague told me.

But, she did not buy from Myntra. She bought the same lipstick from Nykaa.

Why? "I got a 420 discount. The listed price was 2,550. In addition, I also received a MAC cleansing oil free," she said.

Discounts work like magic in e-tailing and this is nothing new. For almost a decade now, Amazon and Flipkart have engaged in a battle to grab a customer at any cost. Many e-commerce companies, who couldn't sustain the ever ballooning costs of customer acquisition, bit the dust.

While that battle was mostly fought for mobile phones, other electronic items and household products, beauty is a relatively newer category. For many years, online beauty shopping was Nykaa's playground.

It's getting crowded.

Last year, the Tata group launched beauty retail platform Tata Cliq Palette; Reliance Retail Ventures launched Tira to sell 'mass and prestige beauty products'; Sephora, a global beauty retailer partnered with a subsidiary of Reliance Retail Ventures to develop beauty retail in India.

Myntra, which became synonymous with fashion shopping online, now sees beauty as its second growth engine.