Douglas: European Beauty Retailer

Douglas is the leading premium beauty platform headquartered in Germany, and with operations and stores across most of Europe. They boast offering over 130,000 beauty products to their customers and are the #1 beauty destination in Europe, reporting over 3 billion euros in revenue in their 2019/20 fiscal year.

In April 2021 Douglas started working with CMSPI because, like many businesses, they needed to make a large pivot to handle a tremendous amount of ecommerce growth. This led to additional challenges beyond driving conversion rates, as it became apparent, that a sophisticated payments strategy wouldn’t just decrease costs, but can boost revenues as well. Thus, Douglas decided to build a payments hub as one of their strategic ecommerce growth pillars, that would also act as a knowledge hub for the company and drive growth across Europe.

Solution

Douglas relied on CMSPI because of the proprietary data and insights offered that would help amplify their position in the market. The engagement started with CMSPI providing a comprehensive cost and approvals audit that initiated the journey of increasing their payments productivity. Related to costs, CMSPI presented a clear and actionable overview of their cost optimisation potential for the short, medium, and long term, including support in selecting their preferred payment partner and assessing their payments mix. While for approvals, CMSPI provided ecommerce and fraud strategy and provider selection assistance, specifically supporting Douglas’ internal strategy to find the right partners that fit company values and goals to reduce friction in the payments supply chain.

Benefits Achieved

CMSPI was able to help Douglas uncover significant overcharges that freed up funds that were able to be invested in further growing the team with subject matter experts. Additional areas of improvement included the creation of a sound Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) strategy and practical next steps for increasing approval rates for ecommerce payments. Perhaps most excitingly though, the engagement with CMSPI allowed for a true payments partnership to form with Douglas that continues to this day.