Online Sales of Health and Beauty Products Up in 2022

It turns out that 2022 was a moderately good year for online merchants in the health and beauty category. Digital sales of makeup, moisturizers, vitamins, perfume and more rose, even as shoppers felt safe returning to brick and mortar stores. In addition, the median average ticket for the 56 ecommerce retailers in the Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 in the health/beauty category hit $93 in 2022, a rise of more than 12% from the $83 recorded in 2021.

However, much of that rise can be explained by inflation, which stood at 6.5% year-over-year in December 2022. In fact, the average conversion rate in the category dropped in 2022 to 4.0% in 2022 from 4.1% a year earlier. Similarly, the median 853,182 monthly unique visitors to merchants’ websites in the category was a drop of 13.3 percent from the 983,885 recorded in 2021.

The Beauty Industry is Booming: $26.76 billion in Online Sales

A look at total category sales in health and beauty suggests that more than inflation might be at work. Online sales among the Top 1000 retailers in the category reached $26.76 billion in 2022. That put the Top 1000 online share of total (brick and mortar and online) sales in the category at 6.7% – an increase of more than 6% from the 6.3% penetration of a year earlier. In other words, the dollar value and the total share of online sales rose last year.

That $26.76 billion in Top 1000 online category sales represents growth of 9.6% from the $24.3 billion in comparable sales recorded in 2021. That’s more than double the 3.7% growth rate in U.S. total retail category sales, according to a Digital Commerce 360 analysis of U.S. Department of Commerce retail data.