China’s beauty market grew 13% to 162.5 billion yuan ($26.4 billion) in 2013 along with Chinese people’s growing concerns about personal appearances. As more and more shoppers started to buy beauty products online, their purchasing target is expanding from beauty products to beauty services offered by offline stores.
O2O beauty service Beauty Plus has received 8 million yuan (US$1.3 million) of angel investment from Qinjiang Capital and Andrisen Capital.
Founded in April this year, Beauty Plus is an O2O e-commerce platform that sells beauty services from various offline institutions like beauty salons, barber shops, manicure shops, Yoga and postpartum recovery clubs. The site has attracted over 1,000 offline beauty service merchants, but it now only operates in Shenzhen.
To construct a merchant credit system, Beauty Plus launched deposit and merchant rating mechanisms similar to Taobao’s to protect the interests of customers. The deposit will be used to compensate the users when they are dissatisfied with the service.
The company also operates a namesake app where offline merchants can check the status of their shops, and individual users can make reservations and make comments, etc. The app also integrates a beauty community feature, allowing users to share beauty tips.
image credit: Beauty Plus