Launch your skincare brand on Shopify with our step-by-step guide. Learn about key features, integrations, and how to attract high-intent customers.

Why is Shopify the best platform for a skincare brand?

Shopify handles the entire sales ecosystem in one place. Skincare shoppers expect detailed product pages, ingredient breakdowns, straightforward descriptions, subscriptions, and clear routines. Shopify makes all of that easy to build, scale, and maintain.

Shopify also has the strongest integration options. Your email marketing, SMS, reviews, and subscriptions all plug in cleanly. You can integrate tools or custom code for skin quizzes, replenishment reminders, dermatology certifications, whatever makes your brand stand out.

It’s also unbeatable for growth when people are ready to make the move from hobby to serious brand. Checkout speed, compliance, built-in security, and mobile performance are already handled. The platform supports everything skincare brands rely on: bundles, routine builders, ingredient callouts, and loyalty programs. Plus, we have created wholesale portals and help set up customers for success with professional inventory organization to speed up their workflows.

Shopify vs WordPress vs Squarespace for your skincare brand

Choosing the right e-commerce platform for your business is crucial. Here's a quick comparison of the top three major e-commerce platforms on the market today:

Shopify: The go-to for speed, reliability, and deep e-commerce features. It's fast to set up, secure, excellent for large catalogues, and has a rich app ecosystem, though it comes at a higher monthly cost.
WooCommerce (WordPress): Offers maximum customization but requires more technical skill (hosting, security, maintenance). It's great for technical users managing large catalogues, but often involves higher long-term developer costs and can be fragile due to plugin reliance.
Squarespace: Best for simple, small stores prioritizing beautiful design and ease of use over complex e-commerce features. It's low maintenance and mid-range in cost, but has limited scalability and feature depth.

The duo at Left Designs were fabulous! They made the entire process of a website update so straightforward and broke it down into manageable step by step pieces for me. Where I had frustrations with my current website and its functionality, they were able to identify the problem (often that I wasn’t to able to articulate myself) and present a simple solution. They found and recommended a new theme for may website based on my branding and product line. Any ideas I had for improving the user experience were easily added to their work plan after our initial meeting.
**Ali Vervaeke, Founder & Formulator of Verv Skin**

Is it easy to maintain a Shopify site on your own?

Yes, when the site is built correctly, to suit your brand with your unique clients in mind. Shopify is designed so founders can manage the everyday essentials without relying on a developer. Adding products, updating prices, uploading new images, changing homepage sections, creating discounts, writing blogs, and fulfilling orders are all straightforward.

Where the difference really shows is in how the site is set up before handoff. A lot of frustration comes from sites built with messy collections, poorly organized templates, or hard-coded content. That’s the opposite of how we work.

At Left Designs, we build every skincare site around smart collections, dynamic templates, and clean metafields. That means the right information (ingredients, routines, skin type, certifications, bundle options) automatically pulls into the right place on the front end. Clients don’t have to dig into the theme code or worry about “breaking” a page. They just update the fields, hit save, and the site handles the rest. To make the transition easy, we give every client two things:

• A detailed handoff document that shows how to update products, homepage content, collections, metafields, and routine-specific sections.

• An optional onboarding Zoom meeting where we walk through the backend together, answer questions, and make sure the founder feels comfortable running the site on their own.

Maintaining a Shopify site is absolutely doable. A well-built foundation makes daily updates simple. And if your product catalogue is already a little chaotic… we never say no to a satisfying deep clean.

Setting up your Shopify site on your own vs. hiring a Shopify partner

Every skincare brand attracts a slightly different audience, but the customer priorities are surprisingly consistent: **clarity, confidence, and proof.**

You can set up a Shopify site yourself; that’s the appeal of the platform. The real question is whether you have the time and expertise. Most skincare founders are already stretched thin. They’re formulating products, managing vendors, handling fulfillment, and keeping up with marketing. Building a polished, high-performing website on top of all that becomes one task too many. That’s where hiring a Shopify partner makes a measurable difference.

We’ve worked with skincare brands before, so we already understand the headaches: ingredient-heavy catalogues, multi-step routines, refills, skin-type pathways, product education, upsells, streamlining wholesale orders, and consistency across the whole store. In our discovery call, we zero in on your specific challenges and build the site to solve them from the ground up.

We handle the technical heavy lifting (custom ingredient metafields, dynamic routine sections, automated upsells, smart collections) so everything updates itself instead of relying on you to manually maintain it.

Ready to launch your skincare brand on a solid foundation?

You built your skincare brand on quality, clear ingredients, and a strong vision. Your website deserves the same intentional care.

Setting up a high-performing Shopify store for a skincare brand involves more than just selecting a pretty theme. It requires expertise in product catalogue organization, dynamic ingredient callouts, routine builders, and seamless customer pathways. You need a platform that scales with you, and a partner who understands the difference between a soap company and a complex multi-step skincare line.

At Left Designs, we translate your unique brand vision into a brand-aligned, intuitive, and conversion-focused Shopify store that your customers will trust and enjoy using. Stop spending time wrestling with hard-coded issues or generic templates, and start focusing on creating your amazing products. We got this!

Let's discuss your unique challenges and build the custom e-commerce solution that elevates your brand.

Schedule your discovery call today

Which skincare brands have we worked with?

We’ve had the pleasure of working with these skincare brands in 2025;

• Verv Skin: a full Shopify build with ingredient metafields, routine sections, and a modernized product catalogue.

• Welcome to Natural: moved this storefront from Wix to Shopify and worked with the founder to create clearer navigation, stronger product storytelling, and better mobile performance.

• Light & Salt Soap Co.: updated their existing Shopify setup, including customizations to their existing theme, streamlined product organization, and optimized pages for handmade soap and skincare.

• Técare: a clean, professional Shopify build focused on service-based and education-first skincare with a focus on a 40+ Ottawa customer market.

Every brand is different, so we adjust to what your clients are looking for

Every skincare brand attracts a slightly different audience, but the customer priorities are surprisingly consistent: clarity, confidence, and proof. The way those needs show up on your website depends on your product line, your formulations, and your brand story. Here’s how that played out in our recent projects:

Verv Skin

Their customers wanted help understanding how to use the products together: what to apply first, what pairs well, and what fits into a daily ritual.

We created a smart custom Layering Ritual section that appears automatically on their facial products so customers can see the step-by-step routine at a glance, and scrolls to the appropriate section, depending on the product. We added tailored upsell sections that recommend complementary products, increasing AOV while keeping the experience helpful, not pushy.

Customers also cared deeply about formulation quality, so we updated their existing “Made With Real, Fresh Ingredients” feature section so it highlights what sets their products apart and builds trust instantly with metafields. The founder can simply select the featured ingredients in the product metafields, and they get loaded into the front end.

Técare

Their audience needed guidance, especially women over 40 looking for reliable, expert-backed advice. We built a custom education hub to house their age-specific skincare content and added embedded educational video blocks directly on product pages. Customers get the context they need without leaving the page or losing momentum.

Product education is at the centre of Técare’s brand identity, so we created a custom Education page where clients can learn more about product benefits.

Ready to build a skincare site that truly serves your customers?

Schedule your discovery call today

About Left Designs

Left Designs is a Canadian, woman-owned digital agency specializing in custom e-commerce web development, primarily on the Shopify platform. Based in Toronto, co-founders Lynn and Jessica focus on offering a collaborative, transparent, and approachable service. We take your website off your hands so you can actually focus on your business.

We partner with product-focused businesses, especially in the skincare and jewelry sectors, to build high-performing, brand-aligned websites. We work with multiple web platforms and service clients all over North America. Since launching full-time two years ago, we have successfully launched dozens of projects with more to come in 2026!