Creating a seamless customer experience is a top priority for retailers aiming to attract and retain shoppers. This can be achieved through various strategies, including a smooth checkout process, multiple payment options, a cohesive omnichannel journey, fraud prevention, technological advancements, and loyalty programs that encourage repeat business. 

Industry research indicates that 60% of Australians are likely to spend more or choose a brand more frequently after joining a top-tier loyalty program. MECCA serves as a prime example, with 4.5 million shoppers currently enrolled in its four-tier program, Beauty Loop. This highlights the program’s significant influence, as it has become a central aspect of their customer base. 

MECCA, a prominent player in the Australian beauty market, has positioned itself as a leader by providing a customer-centric experience focused on education, engagement, and personalised service. This strategy has fostered loyalty and contributed significantly to the brand’s growth, including a strong online presence. 

Ian Burl, the Chief Retail Officer at Mecca, discusses with Bernadette Walsh, Marketing Partnerships Manager at Payments Consulting Network, how the company has addressed every touchpoint in the customer journey. Mecca is continuously seeking advancements to ensure a seamless and customer-centric experience across its 110 stores in Australia and New Zealand, as well as its online platform. The company remains committed to pushing the boundaries in delivering an exceptional customer experience. 

Read the full interview below.

Bernadette Walsh: Please provide an overview of the Mecca business. 

Ian Burl: MECCA is an Australian prestige beauty retailer founded by Jo Horgan in 1997. We have over 110 stores across Australia and New Zealand, along with an online store. MECCA employs more than 7,000 people and carries products from over 200 brands. We are known for our class-leading in-store service, a wide range of beauty treatments, and highly educated teams who help customers navigate our extensive beauty offering from around the world. 

BW: What challenges do you encounter as an omnichannel business? For instance, if a customer buys online and returns in-store, do you have systems in place to recognise the customer and what they have purchased? 

IB: Our omnichannel journey has been shaped by a clear ambition: to seamlessly integrate digital and physical experiences in response to evolving customer behaviours—accelerated significantly by the pandemic. We embarked on a digital transformation to deliver consistent, personalised experiences across all channels. This included enhancing our website to better integrate content and commerce, resulting in improved conversion rates. 

While we have made strong progress, achieving a fully connected omnichannel experience remains a work in progress. We understand our customer—their purchases, browsing history, favourite brands, and preferred ways to shop—but we do not yet share these insights across every touchpoint. We continue to strive for seamless, connected experiences where every part of MECCA recognises and responds to each individual, regardless of how they engage with us. 

BW: What are the key payment challenges when operating in–store and online. 

IB: Before our digital transformation, MECCA’s commerce experience was fragmented, with in-store and online transactions operating through different payment providers. This created inefficiencies for both our customers and our internal teams, and limited our ability to create a cohesive, frictionless journey. 

In 2020, we began partnering with Adyen, starting with a rollout across all Australian stores. This strategic move allowed us to standardise and modernise our payment infrastructure, and by extending this partnership to our online platform in 2024, we unlocked greater capability and consistency across channels. 

BW: What are the strategies/technologies you have deployed to optimise payments and the customer checkout experience? 

IB: We have introduced a range of strategies and technologies to optimise the checkout experience as the business has scaled, particularly in retail where peak periods demand agility. We have trialed mobile POS, satellite POS setups, express checkouts for service bookings, streamlined gift card processing, and Click & Collect enhancements. We are still finding our feet in terms of the right execution across all formats, to ensure these solutions reduce wait times and improve flow for our customers in-store. 

As previously mentioned, our partnership with Adyen has been a key enabler of progress, first in-store and then online. This has allowed us to unify our payment infrastructure and unlock new efficiencies, including the ability to identify and easily implement cost-saving initiatives around processing fees. We are always evolving alongside our customers, and that means offering the payment methods they want. In early 2025, we launched Apple Pay, slightly later than most, but the impact was immediate. It helped reduce abandonment, lower fraud risk, and improve authorisation rates, with strong customer adoption. 

We also introduced a new fraud detection tool in late 2024, which has led to a notable increase in approval rates and significant reduction in operational overheads. On the optimisation front, we are continually experimenting using A/B testing on our online checkout experience to explore how we can reduce cognitive load and eliminate unnecessary friction. 

BW: Given your customer demographic, do you offer BNPL as a payment method and have you noticed an uptake in sales? 

IB: At MECCA, we were considered late adopters of Buy Now, Pay Later products compared to many other retailers. That was a deliberate decision, we wanted to be sure that introducing BNPL aligned with both our business and what is right for our customers. It was important to us that the experience remained responsible, transparent, and added genuine value to how our customers shop with us. 

We introduced Afterpay in 2019, and more recently, PayPal Pay in 4 in 2024. Both have been very well received by our customers, offering greater flexibility and choice at checkout. We have seen strong engagement with these options and continue to ensure they support a seamless and customer-centric experience at MECCA. 

BW: How important is your customer loyalty program in securing returning customers? 

IB: The AFR recently reported; Mecca calls Beauty Loop “the best beauty community in the world” for good reason: more than 4.5 million shoppers are enrolled across its four tiers, so the program now is the customer base. 

Members are kept coming back by quarterly Beauty Loop Boxes, masterclasses and first- access launches—emotional perks that swap “discounts” for “belonging.” Industry research shows 60 % of Australians increase spend or choose a brand more often once they join a top-tier loyalty scheme, and Beauty Loop is consistently cited as a best-practice example. 

Put simply, the program is Mecca’s engine for repeat traffic and lifetime value; securing returning customers is not just helped by Beauty Loop—it depends on it. 

BW: What innovations or technologies are on your roadmap for the next 12 months?  

IB: MECCA leverages a great deal of modern technologies to run the business and power our leading customer experiences. The next 12 months continues to evolve our technology estate in a few keyways. Firstly, we will complete our migration to a cloud data warehousing platform supporting accessibility to data, handling the scale of data we create, and improving decision-making across the company. Roll-out of machine learning for labour forecasting in store will help all store managers optimise their rosters. We are also actively rolling out generative AI within our support centre and administrative roles while experimenting on the use of generative AI in customer facing experiences. 

MECCA’s customer-centric approach is the foundation of its success. By focusing on education, personalised service, and community engagement, MECCA has built loyalty into every touchpoint, catering to individual needs and preferences.

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Author: Bernadette Walsh, Marketing Partnerships Manager, Melbourne, Payments Consulting Network  

Bernadette’s diverse work experience has given her the opportunity to observe the different approaches to business and problem-solving, allowing her to develop a unique perspective on how to build relationships and solve problems. Her resourcefulness and willingness to think outside of the box have been invaluable assets in her ability to find creative solutions to complex problems.

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Payments Consulting Network is a media partner of NRF ‘25 Retail’s Big Show Asia Pacific, happening in Singapore from June 3-5 at Marina Bay Sands.

Ian Burl will be a guest panelist at the conference. He will discuss format innovations and the reinvention of retail spaces for the hybrid consumer.

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