Myntra is selling lipstick and blush. Should Nykaa be worried?

livemint.com:

₹420 discount. The listed price was ₹2,550. In addition, I also received a MAC cleansing oil free," she said.

Discounts work like magic in e-tailing and this is nothing new. For almost a decade now, Amazon and Flipkart have engaged in a battle to grab a customer at any cost. Many e-commerce companies, who couldn’t sustain the ever ballooning costs of customer acquisition, bit the dust.

While that battle was mostly fought for mobile phones, other electronic items and household products, beauty is a relatively newer category. For many years, online beauty shopping was Nykaa’s playground. It’s getting crowded.

Last year, the Tata group launched beauty retail platform Tata Cliq Palette; Reliance Retail Ventures launched Tira to sell ‘mass and prestige beauty products’; Sephora, a global beauty retailer partnered with a subsidiary of Reliance Retail Ventures to develop beauty retail in India. Myntra, which became synonymous with fashion shopping online, now sees beauty as its second growth engine. Myntra always sold some beauty products but there was little focus before the pandemic.

In 2020, the company decided to build the category more strategically. In this short time, it has partnered with a host of premium domestic and international brands—apart from MAC, there is NYX Professional Makeup, Victoria’s Secret, Makeup Revolution London, Armani, Bath and Body Works, L’Oreal Paris, Lakme, Maybelline New York, Shiseido, Forest Essentials and Philips. Yet, as my colleague’s shopping behaviour shows, cracking this category won’t be easy.