Selling online

The best-suited product in the estate for online sale, and the channel where the claim rules are most often broken.

The product ships beautifully

Light, small, unbreakable, no refrigeration, no fragility. A tube goes in a padded envelope at the lowest postal rate there is.

Which means the shipping cost is a small fraction of the order rather than a barrier, and multi-packs ship for almost the same as singles. That is the whole economics of the channel.

Your product page is labeling

The determination of intended use is made from labeling and advertising, and a product page is both.

A tube labeled correctly as a cosmetic, listed under a heading that says "for dry, chapped lips", is a drug being sold without a Drug Facts panel. The heading is the evidence.

The same applies to your category names, your meta description, your ad copy and the customer reviews you choose to feature. A reposted review saying it healed someone's lips is a claim you have adopted.

This is the single easiest place to lose the cosmetic position, because the person writing the listing is usually not the person who thought about the label.

Heat and the summer problem

A tube in a mailbox in July is above its melting point. It arrives slumped and the customer reads it as a defect.

Ship early in the week so nothing sits over a weekend, say something honest about warm weather on the product page, and consider a harder summer formula rather than a disclaimer.

Where the volume is

Multi-packs and gift sets, not singles. A single tube at a few dollars barely covers the transaction cost of selling it online.

Which makes the pack the product, and the tube a component, and that reframing is worth doing before designing the packaging.

References