98% sales now online
Sally Beauty
Helping an international beauty distributor and retailer flourish despite the pandemic
The first Sally Beauty store opened in 1964 in the U.S. city of New Orleans. Since then, Sally Beauty has grown to become one of the world’s largest distributors of professional beauty products. When the pandemic hit in 2020, we helped them adapt to the huge upsurge in online sales—maintaining the fast, helpful service their customers love, while helping keeping fraud to a minimum.
The challenge: Adapting quickly to the online boom
In early 2020 the pandemic hit, and according to Sally Beauty they saw an 800% increase in their eCommerce sales—virtually overnight. Having nearly all their business transfer instantly online was something Sally Beauty was not equipped or staffed for. For example, the internal team were still manually reviewing every flagged order. Chargeback rates were also too high.
One of Sally Beauty’s key goals is to offer the best customer experience possible. To continue to do that in a world that moved online, they needed to process orders quicker, with less manual work, but without opening themselves up to fraud. They also needed a solution that would open new ways of getting products to customers, including next-day delivery and Buy Online, Pick up In Store (BOPIS).
What we did
A close, collaborative relationship
Cybersource has been working with Sally Beauty since 2018. With our insight, strong working relationship and unique modular system, we were quickly able to integrate new products and enhance their digital payment capabilities—while keeping fraud to an all-time low.
Fewer false flags, with Decision Manager
Sally Beauty’s system was flagging too many genuine orders as potentially fraudulent. Decision Manager solves this issue by drawing on insight from over 141 billion Visa transactions processed around the world, applying machine learning to provide a far more accurate view of genuine vs fraudulent transactions.
New ways to pay, with Token Management Service
With Cybersource Token Management Service, Sally Beauty could allow customers to choose preferred payment methods and one-click checkout. Token Management Service enables cross-channel buying mechanisms like BOPIS. In addition, Token Management Service also helps protect customers’ personal and card information before, during and after every transaction. Meaning customers can feel safer, and fraud levels are kept to a minimum.
The difference our work made
Sally Beauty’s future goal is to continue to evolve as an omnichannel retailer. Today, 98% of Sally Beauty sales are successfully being managed via eCommerce, including through BOPIS, curb side pick up, ship from store and delivery.
A seamless customer experience
Essential to Sally Beauty was the efficiency of BOPIS, which meant orders needed to be processed quickly. Sally Beauty was able to help guarantee orders would be in and out of the queue within one hour. Sally Beauty can now guarantee same-day delivery and BOPIS all year round, including weekends and holidays.
Fewer reviews, lower fraud
In 2018, fraud rates were 1.23% of all sales. By 2021 they were best in class, while manual review rates had also fallen.
Knowing and understanding fraud trends
With the continued support from the Cybersource team, alongside our Decision Manager tool, Sally Beauty is now able to stay one step ahead in the fight against fraud—with insight into emerging fraud trends and how to cut it off.