New E-Commerce Tracking Service for the Beauty Sector 10/08/00 NPD Beauty Trends has launched a comprehensive e-commerce tracking service for the beauty industry. The new offerings include both point of sale tracking for the online beauty sector and a syndicated report evaluating the effectiveness of a wide range of beauty websites. The Beauty e-Commerce Sales Tracking Service will provide e-commerce sales information from a panel of e-tailers to help online beauty marketers understand what is selling and where. Major category and pricing information will show who the key competitors are for various market segments including fragrances, bath and body products, facial skincare, haircare and makeup. Measures will include brand share in dollars and units and average prices. According to Timra Carlson, Vice President for NPD Beauty Trends, "We are very excited about being able to share our valuable beauty industry expertise garnered from years of retail point of sale tracking experience as we analyse beauty e-tailer data. This enables us to provide online versus offline analyses, focusing solely on the beauty industry." The Site Surfer service will provide an in-depth analysis of beauty websites, how consumers use them and what they think of them in order to help subscribers understand why consumers are buying. Each beauty website will be evaluated by hundreds of Internet representative Web users accessed through NPD's Online Panel. Information will be gathered on each respondent's history with the site, overall satisfaction, length of time spent at the site, website ratings, likelihood to purchase from the site, likelihood to revisit and more. "Many companies measure hits, click-throughs and page views, but that's really only a measurement of traffic - the what and not the why. The NPD Site Surfer report will uncover the why by examining what is most important to online beauty consumers today," added Carlson.