Personalised health and beauty advice in one click

Etos has been awarded the title of ‘best drugstore in the Netherlands’ seven times. The chain will now be supplementing its offline success with an online platform. Etos offers a personal shopping experience that combines advice, inspiration and smart savings. As their digital e-commerce partner, DEPT® was responsible for the platform’s development, design and concept. All within a period of six months.

The webshop is a platform where anyone can go for anything related to beauty, personal (baby) care and health, at any time of day. The concept — from design to platform — focuses on an outstanding user experience. That’s why, as Etos.nl customer, you’ll experience the same level of personal advice, (brand) inspiration and ease of use as in the physical stores. Etos employees help customers discover new trends and products, while the A-brands provide inspiration and are easy to find through their own landing pages. The new Etos.nl is proof that attractive design, a fantastic user experience, conversion and SEO go hand in hand.

The enormous range of products is made available through four main categories: beauty, personal care, health and baby. While scrolling through the products, the customer is surprised by inspiring content, handy tips and interesting products, fully tailored to his or her requirements. The search is fast and simple because all the important steps in the customer journey have been extensively tested and optimised.

To optimally load the Etos brand, recognisable typographic stylistic elements have been designed and developed in a playful manner. The headings, characteristic of the Etos brand, jump out of the grid when Etos wants to inspire users, while informative components take on a sleeker typographic style. This provides a good balance between the fun that’s associated with the Etos brand and the user-friendliness of the online shopping experience. Moreover, in collaboration with Etos, DEPT® established a content strategy that produced a number of copywriting and photography guidelines. This includes the humour incorporated in the tone-of-voice, the lovely photography and the subtle animations that return throughout the customer journey. All elements that make the online shopping experience even more fun!

As the Etos webshop had to be launched quickly, Salesforce Commerce Cloud was the logical choice. The SaaS platform is known for its speed, scalability, many merchandising options and out-of-the-box features that allow an initial version to be launched very quickly. What’s more, the platform also offers a range of Artificial Intelligence options, which are quite helpful when it comes to smart recommendations and searches.

However, there were more aspects that we had to keep in mind: as a member of Ahold, there are stringent requirements with regard to reconciliation, security, performance and accessibility. These requirements affect the entire development process, from design, specifications, building, and testing to handover. The many integrations with respect to loyalty, product catalogue, financial reports, user provisioning, store information, inventory and price details made this a challenging project with a large number of involved parties. Since Etos had never had a webshop before, many of these processes had to be designed and worked out from scratch.