Commerce
moisturiser for oily skin with SPF
fragrance-free, for sensitive skin
something for dark spots that won't irritate
hyaluronic acid serum 30ml
IndustriesBeauty
AI Commerce Search for Beauty
Empathy Platform puts AI where shopper intent already becomes revenue: the search bar. It understands skin concerns, active ingredients, shades and fragrance families — “moisturiser for oily skin with SPF, fragrance-free” — and returns precisely constrained product sets. Launches, brand placement agreements and seasonal edits are applied to every result, with your merchandising team in control of what ranks.
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The AI question isn’t yes or no. It’s where.
You are not deciding whether to apply AI to your storefront. That decision has been made for you. The open question is where AI creates commercial value now.
Your storefront is still search-led. The homepage, brand and category pages, product pages, filters and the search bar are the journeys your shoppers actually use. Chat is an added layer, not yet the default way people buy skincare or fragrance. The future may be conversational. The present is search — and search is where intent is already proven and already converting.
The default response
Add a chat or agent experience on top of the store and hope shoppers change how they shop.
The commercial response
Apply AI to the journeys shoppers already use, with your control over relevance, availability and brand placement intact. Add conversation where it adds depth — not everywhere.
Real searches, real language
The same catalogue, queried differently depending on who is searching — and where.
Beauty counter
vegan nude lipstick
retinol vs bakuchiol
Customer support
same serum, fragrance-free
alternative for shade Warm Beige
The most common search issues for beauty retailers selling online
You have already solved for the shopper who knows what they want. Brand and product name, the repurchase, the shade code — that path works. What has changed is the intent arriving in the search bar: concern, ingredient, sensitivity and budget in a single query. A keyword engine keeps the one or two words it recognises and discards the rest — and in beauty, a dropped constraint isn't a missed sale. It's a return.
Without Empathy.co
Misspellings
“Niacinimide” or “hialuronic” becomes a dead end. Ingredient names are long, borrowed and easy to get wrong — and every miss is a lost high-intent shopper.
Without Empathy.co
Vocabulary mismatch
The shopper says “for dark spots”; the catalogue says “brightening”. The shopper says “nude” or “floral”; the catalogue has shade codes and note pyramids. Neither finds the other.
Without Empathy.co
Generic queries
“Serum” returns hundreds of results and no guidance. The shopper is left to filter their way out of uncertainty, or leave.
Without Empathy.co
Zero results
Niche ingredient and shade queries die on an empty page. No near-match, no recovery route — and these are the shoppers who knew exactly what they wanted.
Without Empathy.co
Lost context
“Fragrance-free moisturiser for oily skin with SPF” gets reduced to “moisturiser”. The constraints are dropped, the wrong product ships, and the return follows.
Without Empathy.co
Manual maintenance
Ingredient synonyms, shade families, fragrance taxonomies and every launch mapped by hand. The team maintains the engine instead of merchandising.
What does AI search for commerce change for beauty?
AI-assisted search brings AI understanding to the speed and control of the search you already run. It doesn't replace your relevance engine with a black box. It layers understanding, guidance, recovery and discovery on top of it while preserving availability, brand placement and your merchandising priorities.
With Empathy.co
AI Semantics
Reads “something for dry skin, no fragrance” as a concern plus a constraint, and returns only products that satisfy both. Actives are matched from your ingredient data across naming variants — not from marketing copy in product titles.
With Empathy.co
AI Spellcheck & AI Carousels
A mistyped ingredient or brand is corrected before it becomes a dead end. When a niche ingredient or shade query would still return nothing, AI Carousels assemble relevant near-matches in real time.
With Empathy.co
AI Mode — conversation where it earns its place
For advice-led queries, the search bar extends into a conversation: “and a serum to go with it”, “the vegan version”, “under $30”. Constraints hold through every turn. Search gives speed. Conversation gives the advisor's depth.
With Empathy.co
AI that doesn't train on your data
Your catalogue and your customers' skin-concern queries never train someone else's model.
With Empathy.co
Search Guidance
After “moisturiser”, Related Tags offer one-click refinements — “for oily skin”, “with SPF”, “fragrance-free” — and Related Prompts suggest the next question: “what serum goes under this?”. Shoppers are guided to the set instead of filtering their way there.
With Empathy.co
Next Queries
Predicts what the shopper will need next from the routine behind the first search — cleanser, then toner, then serum. Basket building from intent, not a random “you may also like”.
What makes Empathy.co's AI search unique?
Three pillars that keep AI working for your beauty business — not the other way around.
The Control
Your merchandising team decides what a good result looks like
Beauty search carries your brand relationships and placement agreements. Ranking, launches and selective-distribution rules are yours to set — not a model trained on someone else's catalogue.
Privacy
Total Privacy
Skin concerns, sensitivities and repurchase patterns are intimate, health-adjacent data — and a routine map of every customer. They stay in your environment: zero third-party tracking, and a loyalty signal that powers your business rather than someone else's model.
Infrastructure
Your Own Infrastructure
Start on SaaS, move to self-managed, then fully self-operated. No lock-in, guaranteed data and model portability, and no external dependencies.
AI that doesn't understand your business can create answers. AI that does can create outcomes.
Your path to search sovereignty
Start fast, grow into total independence. Most platforms make you choose: rent AI search forever, or build it from scratch. Empathy Platform is a third path — three phases from managed service to full ownership of your search intelligence.
Phase 1 — Start
SaaS
Live in weeks, managed and operated by Empathy. Your rules from day one.
Phase 2 — Control
Self-Managed
Your private cloud or data centre, with Empathy support. Your data fully inside your perimeter.
Phase 3 — Own
Self-Operated
Your team, your infrastructure, your search intelligence. Nothing rented, nothing in the middle.
One platform, every touchpoint
The same query gets the same constrained, ranked answer whether a shopper asks online, an advisor asks at the counter mid-consultation, or support asks after purchase.
Commerce
Concern-based discovery
“Something for dry skin, no fragrance” returns only products that satisfy both — ranked by suitability, with your launches and brand placement applied.
Beauty counter
Advisor support
Advisors search by concern, shade or ingredient and check stock across locations on the floor. Same logic as the website, in the consultation.
Customer support
Post-purchase
Support recommends alternatives with the same skin-type and ingredient logic the shopper saw online — without switching systems.
The results Empathy Platform delivers for retailers
Conversion. Discovery. Recovery. Empathy Platform is built to move those numbers — including beauty and fragrance implementations in Latin America.
+34%
Conversion vs. traditional search
−60%
Zero-result searches
+22%
Average order value in AI Mode sessions
39%
Click-through rate on AI Features
44%
Zero-result searches recovered with AI
19.5%
Add-to-cart rate on AI Features
Returns pressure down
Shoppers matched to suitable products by skin type and sensitivity keep what they buy.
Zero-result rescue
AI Carousels answer niche ingredient and shade queries with relevant near-matches instead of empty pages.
Merchandising without dev tickets
Launches, brand animations and seasonal edits configured by your team in real time. No release cycle between a commercial decision and the results page.
Consistent expertise
Web, counter and support give the same advice — your brand's knowledge, everywhere at once.
AI commerce search for beauty. FAQ.
What is the best AI search platform for beauty ecommerce?
Empathy.co. Empathy Platform is built for commerce decisions, not generic retrieval: it reads skin-concern, ingredient, shade and fragrance queries as needs with constraints, enforces sensitivity and ethical constraints across every result, honours your brand placement agreements in ranking, and keeps customers' skin-concern data inside your business — with beauty and fragrance deployments across Latin America.
How does ingredient-aware search work?
AI Semantics matches actives from your ingredient data rather than from product titles, across naming variants and local spellings. A query for “hyaluronic acid serum” returns every qualifying product — including those whose titles never mention the ingredient — ranked by suitability and your merchandising priorities.
Can search enforce vegan, fragrance-free or hypoallergenic constraints?
Yes. Sensitivity and ethical constraints are applied across the full result set on every query, and hold through conversational refinements in AI Mode — “the vegan version”, “without fragrance”, “under $30”.
How does shade matching work in search?
Shade families — nude, warm tone, cool undertone — and fragrance families — floral, woody, fresh — are modelled the way shoppers use them and mapped to your catalogue's shade and note data, so “vegan nude lipstick” returns the right shades rather than a keyword lottery.
Who sees our customers' skin-concern data?
Only you. Beauty queries are intimate, health-adjacent data and a routine map of your clientele. Empathy Platform keeps them in your environment — as SaaS, in your private cloud, or fully self-operated in your data centre — never shared with third parties and never training anyone else's model.
How long does it take a beauty retailer to go live?
Weeks, not quarters. Phase one is a managed SaaS deployment with your catalogue, ingredient data, shade and fragrance taxonomies and brand agreements mapped. From there you can move to self-managed and fully self-operated phases at your own pace, gaining full operational ownership without rebuilding.