Beauty has traditionally been a category where brand loyalty carries considerable weight. Someone finds a moisturiser, mascara, or shampoo that works for them and may continue buying it for years.
Amazon changes that dynamic because the shopping experience continually exposes customers to alternatives. Search results place established brands beside challenger products, sponsored listings, different pack sizes, and competing formulations. A shopper arriving for a familiar product can therefore leave having discovered something cheaper, better reviewed, or more closely matched to what they actually need.
That matters for consumers looking for value, but it has equally important implications for beauty brands competing for Amazon sales, leaving many to wonder whether product discovery is becoming more important than brand loyalty.
Why Does Amazon Give Product Discovery So Much Influence?
Amazon search is largely organised around what somebody wants to buy at that moment. A query such as “vitamin C serum for sensitive skin” gives multiple brands an opportunity to appear, including brands the customer may never previously have considered.
Amazon Ads reports that 35% of surveyed shoppers discover new brands on Amazon, while its beauty research found that 45% of beauty purchases are semi-planned, meaning shoppers have some idea of what they want without necessarily having decided on the exact product.
That semi-planned behaviour is particularly important in beauty. Someone may know they want a retinol serum, concealer, or sulphate-free shampoo while remaining flexible on the brand.
For advertisers, this means category and need-based searches can be commercially important even when branded search already performs strongly.
How Can Discovery Help Shoppers Find Better Value?
Amazon makes comparison unusually easy because several competing products can appear within the same search journey. A customer can quickly compare price, size, reviews, delivery availability, and product claims. They may find that a smaller challenger brand offers a similar specification at a lower price, or that buying a larger pack brings the cost per unit down.
Promotional periods increase this behaviour further. Beauty was the strongest-performing non-consumer-packaged-goods category during Amazon’s 2024 Prime Day analysis, illustrating how responsive beauty shoppers can be when discounts and discovery coincide.
A “better deal”, however, does not always mean the lowest headline price. A £12 moisturiser containing 30ml may offer poorer value than a £16 alternative containing 60ml. Subscribe & Save eligibility, vouchers, bundles, and delivery costs can change the calculation again.
Savvy shoppers increasingly have enough information on the results page to make that comparison themselves.
What Does This Mean for Established Beauty Brands?
Brand recognition still matters. In categories such as skincare, where customers may have spent months finding products that work for them, switching carries a perceived risk.
The difference on Amazon is that loyalty has to coexist with constant exposure to alternatives. Established brands can lose visibility when newer products build stronger reviews, better content, and more effective search and media strategies. Product discovery therefore becomes a route through which competitors can reach somebody who previously appeared to be a loyal customer.
That effect becomes more significant as beauty moves further online. The global beauty sector grew 7.3% year on year in 2024, with e-commerce helping to drive that growth. In the US, e-commerce accounted for 41% of beauty and personal care sales in its analysis.
Premium beauty is also becoming increasingly established on Amazon, Amazon Premium Beauty sales rising by nearly 20% to $15 billion between April 2024 and April 2025, faster than the wider beauty category measured in the same analysis.
How Should Beauty Brands Respond to More Comparison Shopping?
The first response should be to understand which comparisons shoppers are actually making. Search-term data can reveal whether customers reach a product through the brand name or through needs such as “dry scalp shampoo”, “SPF moisturiser” or “foundation for mature skin”. Competitor product targeting can then show where shoppers move between similar products.
That information should influence the product page too.
If shoppers are comparing a £24 serum against five alternatives, vague claims such as “radiant-looking skin” provide limited help. Ingredient concentration, skin type, bottle size, expected usage and application instructions give customers something concrete to compare.
The same principle applies to advertising. Sponsored Products can appear within shopping results and on product pages, allowing brands to enter journeys where another product initially attracted the shopper. Sponsored Brands can support broader brand and product discovery.
For mature advertisers, the opportunity is to distinguish between spend that captures existing demand and spend that genuinely introduces the product to new shoppers.
Should Brands Compete More Aggressively on Price?
Price matters, particularly when Amazon places comparable products close together. Constant discounting is a much less reliable strategy.
A brand reducing a £25 product to £18 may gain additional conversion during a promotional period, but the margin impact needs to be considered alongside advertising cost, Amazon fees and the possibility that customers begin waiting for the next promotion.
A more useful approach is to understand where price sensitivity actually changes shopper behaviour.
Does conversion deteriorate when a competitor moves £3 below you? Does a multi-pack improve conversion without reducing unit economics as heavily as a straight discount? Do vouchers acquire genuinely new customers, or mainly subsidise people who already purchase the product?
The answer will vary by product, which is why promotional performance should be measured beyond total revenue generated during the deal period.
How Can Brands Turn Discovery Into Repeat Purchasing?
Winning a discovery search is only the beginning. If a customer switches moisturiser because they find a better-priced alternative on Amazon, the product experience determines whether that first purchase becomes repeat behaviour.
Beauty brands therefore need to look beyond advertising return and examine new-to-brand customers, repeat purchasing patterns and how different acquisition routes behave over time.
A generic category search may initially appear less efficient than branded advertising because conversion is lower. If those customers subsequently reorder several times, however, its commercial value looks very different.
This is where Amazon’s emphasis on discovery becomes more interesting. It creates opportunities for shoppers to escape habitual purchasing and find products offering better value or a closer fit. At the same time, it forces beauty brands to keep earning visibility and relevance even when they already have considerable awareness.
For consumers, that competition can mean greater choice and more opportunities to find a genuinely better deal. For brands, it makes understanding how shoppers compare, discover and switch products an increasingly important part of Amazon strategy.