9 min read

Sephora, a leading prestige beauty omnichannel retailer, has continued to deliver a best-in-class shopping experience to its customers across its brick-and-mortar stores, on Sephora.com and on the Sephora App.¹

A foundational element of delivering a seamless omnichannel experience is offering payment solutions that enable customers to spend more time discovering the items they want to buy. The retailer wanted to create a single, centralized payment platform to handle all customer purchases, exchanges and returns for an omnichannel sales approach that would be seamless for customers from beginning to end.

To build this, Sephora leveraged J.P. Morgan Payments omnichannel solutions to offer customers frictionless payments across channels. By working with J.P. Morgan Payments, Sephora’s customers enjoy an improved checkout experience, its Beauty Advisors have more time to spend helping customers, and its average basket size has increased.

The challenge

Modern consumers demand flexibility in how, when and where they shop. Sephora’s omnichannel strategy ensures shoppers transition effortlessly between online, in-app and in-store experiences without disruptions.⁷ However, this customer-first approach required a payment ecosystem to minimize friction. “As a customer, a seamless shopping experience is pivotal,” says Amber Turley, Vice President of Omni Convenience and Commerce Partnerships at Sephora. “There are many points of friction in the customer journey, and one big one is payments.”

Combining aspects of customer transactions—from payments and adjustments to holds and returns—can be complex, especially at scale. To enhance the shopping journey and offer Beauty Advisors a complete, centralized experience on the back end, Sephora and J.P. Morgan Payments focused on creating stable and scalable environments to support high capacity and high processing volumes.⁸

The solution

Sephora turned to J.P. Morgan Payments to implement a comprehensive omnichannel payments infrastructure, empowering customers to make purchases easily—wherever they are.

“The pain points that J.P. Morgan helped us ease were really related to our omnichannel experience,” says Jensen. “Figuring out how to perform the omnichannel orchestration of payments, returns and size transactions that cross channels is really complex. By moving our infrastructure to J.P. Morgan, it really enabled us to focus more on the client experience.”

As part of its solution, Sephora launched Tap to Pay on iPhone in hundreds of stores in the U.S. and Canada, allowing Sephora’s Beauty Advisors to accept all types of contactless payments using just an iPhone.⁹ Tap to Pay on iPhone supports multiple payment methods, including credit and debit cards, Apple Pay and other digital wallets, so customers have the power to check out without waiting in a line.

Working with J.P. Morgan has also provided Sephora the stability and redundancy the company needed to continue to provide a top-tier customer experience.⁹

“One thing that’s really important to us was to find a partner that has stability, which is really critical,” says Jensen. “We needed a partner like J.P. Morgan to innovate without sacrificing stability or speed on our checkout experience.”

The results

By working with J.P. Morgan Payments to implement an omnichannel payment strategy, Sephora met its goal of delivering an ever-improved customer experience.¹⁰

Since implementing the new payments solutions, Sephora has seen customers increase their basket sizes by 7%, has enabled customers to check out twice as fast as before, and has enabled Beauty Advisors to spend more time with customers, helping them find the items they want.¹¹ Crucially, 99.8% of all transactions are settled automatically by J.P. Morgan Payments technology.¹² This helps speed up the process for Beauty Advisors, who can instead focus on in-store sales and customer assistance—both positive revenue drivers for Sephora.¹²

“J.P. Morgan Payments enables a faster checkout process, higher frequency, and better retention for Sephora and our customers,” says Turley.

Jensen explained that after moving to J.P. Morgan Payments and adopting Tap to Pay on iPhone, Sephora increased mobile transactions by five times. Now, a quarter of in-store transactions are completed by customers using mobile payments.¹³ With the flexibility to process transactions anywhere in store, customers are encouraged to explore more products, make additional purchases and further engage with Beauty Advisors.

“Tap to Pay on iPhone has been a huge game-changer for customers at Sephora,” says Sullivan. “They’re not in that long snake line you usually see.”

By consolidating its payment-related processes with J.P. Morgan Payments, Sephora is also saving about 15 minutes every night on store closing procedures.¹³ The company is providing a better experience for shoppers, and customers can easily complete purchases from wherever they are. “Having the ability to go through different channels and always complete your transaction wherever you want is really important for us,” says Jensen.

Sephora aims to continue using J.P. Morgan Payments to enhance the experience for customers and employees. “We’re always thinking about the next innovation that can bring simplicity to the shopping experience,” says Turley.

With its payment technology and workflows on one platform, the company is set up to provide the best possible experience and drive further sales improvements.

Disclaimer

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Tap to Pay on iPhone requires a supported payment app and the latest version of iOS. Update to the latest version by going to Settings > General > Software Update. Tap Download and Install. Some contactless cards may not be accepted by your payment app. Transaction limits may apply. The Contactless Symbol is a trademark owned by and used with permission of EMVCo, LLC. Tap to Pay on iPhone is not available in all markets. View Tap to Pay on iPhone countries and regions (https://developer.apple.com/tap-to-pay/regions).