Mintel’s first Online Beauty report explores and defines a young and growing e-commerce segment that, prior to this decade, was barely a blip on the internet horizon.

Buoyed by wide broadband adoption and improved e-commerce technologies, online beauty now represents 4-5% of total beauty category sales. It is part of the $12 billion CPG e-commerce segment. Its association with trends, fashion and pop culture makes it more attractive to online marketers and consumers than many other categories that fall under the packaged goods umbrella.

The online beauty market is very fragmented, with hundreds of startups specializing in every niche of the business. While some of these pureplays have a following, brand awareness drives the bulk of the business. On both the mass and prestige ends, e-tailers with a brick/click presence dominate the eight online purchasing channels identified in this report.

On the consumer end, key purchasing motivators are convenience, hard-to-find products and, in some cases, price. These drivers of shopper behavior are further broken down by race, gender, income and other parameters. Two special sections take an in-depth look at the undeveloped market for black beauty products and the high incidences of purchasing among households with children.

Other areas examined by the report include:

top players in dollars and influence plus top online beauty categories

costs of operations, including back-end fulfillment and the impact of promotions

“site drivers,” including social networking, search engine marketing (SEM) and cross-channel merchandising

the role of free gifts, gifts with purchase and other consumer incentives

the role and development of mobile beauty sites, including mobile phone penetration and usage patterns as they relate to product research, purchasing, and demographics.