Ulta Beauty opens livestream events to cosmetics brands

Ulta Beauty brand partners have a new opportunity to directly sell to the retailer’s customers.

The nation’s largest beauty retailer is collaborating with livestream shopping platform buywith to offer cosmetics brands the opportunity to host live shopping events on the Ulta Beauty website. This allows brands to directly engage with customers in real time, enabling product discovery and expanding reach.

It Cosmetics is the first beauty brand to participate in the program and has been hosting livestream promotions on the Ulta site since the end of June 2023.

"We believe live shopping is an exciting touchpoint to engage beauty enthusiasts in meaningful, actionable ways,” said Agustina Sartori, senior director, digital innovation, Ulta Beauty. “As industry leaders, we always seek to chart new paths for and with the beauty community. Having found success with buywith during the holiday season, it was a natural next step to experiment further and bring our brand partners into the programming where appropriate. We are excited to test, learn, and optimize in yet another touchpoint where beauty lovers are actively browsing."

"We are thrilled to join forces with Ulta Beauty and empower the brand partners within its assortment to leverage the power of live shopping,” said Adi Ronen, co-founder & CEO of buywith. Together, we’ll provide a unique, interactive experience for beauty enthusiasts and open new avenues to connect directly. We are confident our work can redefine the live beauty shopping landscape leveraging buywith’s innovative technology to enable engagement with Ulta Beauty's loyal shoppers."

Ulta Beauty shifts e-commerce site to cloud foundation

In other innovative e-commerce initiatives, Ulta Beauty is transforming its digital retail operation with Google Cloud technology and services. The retailer is redesigning its digital store to offer a highly personalized customer experience.

To support this upgrade, Ulta Beauty is implementing Google Cloud, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Google Cloud’s Anthos cloud-based managed services solution. Anthos’ built-in traffic routing enabled Ulta Beauty to save several hundred thousand dollars in additional licensing fees.

The company is relaunching its e-commerce platform with multiple, distinct microservices to perform unique functions. This enables development teams to create and test new features and release fixes faster. Microservices can scale independently, but are interconnected and visible to one another, and can introduce new system complexities at scale.