Beauty E-commerce Benchmarks

Why these numbers look like this

Beauty brands command some of the best gross margins in e-commerce at 60% average, but the 18% average ad cost — the highest in our dataset — reveals how heavily the industry relies on influencer partnerships and paid social to drive discovery. Subscription boxes and auto-replenish programs are the margin savers here, turning a single purchase into a lifetime relationship. The brands winning in beauty are the ones converting paid traffic into subscribers before the first product runs out.