Budding ETailers: Bloom.com & Social Media Sites Make Shopping for Beauty Easy As a Click

When I was introduced to Julie Mahloch, founder of Bloom.com, her passion for the finding the right beauty products was obvious. Her sincere hope is that you’ll never buy the wrong beauty products again.

Bloom.com is an unbiased and personalized e-commerce site that uses social media in order to help you purchase the correct beauty products. Best4U is their profile questionnaire which has a range of questions regarding your eye color, skin tone, age, etc. Your answers are then matched with thousands of other women that fit your profile and products are then recommended to you. You can also leave an unbiased review for a product you have not purchased on their site but have already used. Each purchase comes with a FREE customized “BloomBox” gift filled with luxury products, plus 10% back in BloomDollars. If you spend more than $50.00 on the site, you are given 3 trial sized products with your purchase, $ 50-$ 100.00 gives you 3 trial sized products plus 2 mid sized products and over $ 100, you receive 5 trial sized products, 4 mid sized products and 1 full sized product. There is also a 365 Try It Love It Guarantee that gives you up to a year to exchange the product or have the beauty concierge help you find the right product. Bloom.com is touting itself as the first social beauty store where women help other women to purchase products.

Some brands offering products and samples on Bloom.com

Some of the perks we love: BLOOM.com offers you $ 10.00 for inviting friends; once they purchase their first item, you’ll receive the 10 BloomDollars in your account. I watched a review on youtube.com and felt it could be a new way of purchasing products as their reviews are unbiased. Social media is a conduit to the masses, so this could be an innovative way of purchasing beauty products.

But there are other sites that are hard at work to make sure you never buy the wrong products again. Obviously, BeautyStat.com was started with that same purpose in mind, with a community feel. There is also BirchBox, which delivers a monthly sampling “Goody Box” to your doorstep for the price of a couple of Starbucks lattes. We’ve also written about Beautyfix by Dermstore (beautyfix.com), an exclusive beauty club with limited membership. It’s another site that offers a personalized way to buy products. This site has a host of celebrity panelists that recommend products for you after filling out a full beauty profile and then you choose what to buy. Here you choose 8 products and pay $49.99 –which is a bit steep to me, but after reading the tagline, I realize that you will be receiving over $400.00 worth of beauty products for that cost. The items are limited to seasons so each season you would choose your personalized box. There are exclusive Membership benefits such as earning a $ 25.00 gift card to dermstore.com by reviewing products, inviting friends to the site, etc. They also believe in selling deluxe or only full sized items, no foil packettes here. Free shipping is offered after your 8 products are chosen each season.

So the question to you is — how do you shop for your beauty products and what do you think about all these sites that aim to cut down your beauty clutter? Yay or nay?

Nicole Gordon Levine

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