Case study · Web
A bilingual ecommerce website for a house of beauty brands,entered by brand, by product, or by the problem
Infinity Clinic Pharma manufactures in Egypt against Spanish formulation research, and sells under a spread of house brands — Infinity Naturals, Infinity Spanish Labs, Infinity Supplements, Infinity Care and more besides. The brief was not a shop window for one product line. It was a single storefront that could hold all of those brands at once, in Arabic and in English, and still let a customer who arrived with nothing but a problem — dandruff, dark circles, an acne flare — find the thing that answers it.
The brief
One catalogue that needed three different ways in
Customers do not all arrive knowing the same thing. Some know the brand, some know the product, and most know only what is bothering them.
Several brands living under one shopfront
Naturals, Spanish Labs, Supplements, Care, Wellness and Men are separate propositions with separate audiences, and they all sell from the same store. Each needed to read as its own brand without becoming a walled garden the customer has to reverse out of.
- One store, many house brands
- Brand pages that still feel like brands
- No dead ends between them
People shop by problem, not by product name
Nobody searches for a surfactant. They search for dandruff, hair loss, dark circles, pigmentation, an oily T-zone. Concern-led browsing was treated as a primary route into the catalogue rather than a filter bolted onto a category page.
- Browse by skin, hair or body concern
- Ranges grouped the way a regimen is
- Product type for those who know it
Two languages over one catalogue
The Egyptian market reads and buys in Arabic, and the product science is written in English. Both had to be first-class: one product record, two languages, and a switch that does not dump the customer back on the home page.
- Arabic and English side by side
- Right-to-left layout, not a mirrored patch
- One product, one record
Selling direct, alongside the counter
A pharma house going direct to consumer is adding a channel, not replacing one. Checkout, pricing in Egyptian pounds and the shipping rules had to work for a first-time online buyer without undercutting how the brand already sells.
- Direct-to-consumer checkout
- Pricing in EGP
- Free-shipping threshold built in
What we built
How we built a bilingual ecommerce website on WooCommerce
A WordPress and WooCommerce storefront, designed and developed end to end, then handed over as something the brand's own team could run.
Why WooCommerce carried this bilingual ecommerce website
The taxonomy was the hard part of this project, and WooCommerce leaves it entirely under the owner's control — brand, product type, concern and ingredient range can all coexist as first-class ways in. It also keeps the catalogue and the editorial in one system, on infrastructure the company owns rather than rents.
- Full control of the product taxonomy
- Content and commerce in one place
- Owned, not rented
Know Your Routine, not just a product grid
Skincare is bought as a regimen, in an order, over weeks. A guided routine section sits in the main navigation as a peer of the shop itself, so a customer who does not yet know what to buy has somewhere to go that is not a 400-product listing.
- Guided regimen builder
- Routine before basket
- Products in the order they are used
A home page that merchandises
New Arrivals, Best Sellers, Must Have and Shop By each occupy a real slot, with a hero carousel above them for whatever is running — a bundle, a multi-buy, a seasonal push. The merchandising team can change the front of the store without changing the store.
- New arrivals, best sellers, must-have
- Promotion slots on the home page
- Bundles and multi-buy offers
Accounts, baskets and the second order
Cosmetics is a repeat-purchase category — the whole economics depend on the reorder. Customer accounts, order history and a basket that survives the visit were in from launch rather than treated as a phase two.
- Customer accounts and order history
- A basket that survives the visit
- Reordering made short
What it leaves behind
A storefront the brand kept growing after handover
The part of the brief that only shows its value later: the structure had to absorb products, brands and campaigns nobody had designed for yet.
Editorial the team runs without a developer
The blog sits inside the same system as the catalogue, so advice content and the products it discusses link to each other naturally. Publishing is an editor's job, not a deployment — which is the only reason content programmes like this survive their first busy month.
- Editorial alongside the catalogue
- Advice that links to products
- No developer needed to publish
Room for the brands that did not exist yet
The catalogue we structured has since taken on further house brands and whole new ingredient ranges. They went in as new entries in an existing taxonomy rather than as a redesign, which is exactly what the structure was shaped to allow.
- New brands without a rebuild
- New ranges without a redesign
- Structure that absorbed the growth
A store the owner controls
Products, pricing, promotions, copy and content all sit with the client, on a platform they hold the keys to. A storefront a brand cannot change without calling someone is a storefront that slowly stops matching the business.
- Self-serve catalogue management
- Promotions changed in-house
- No agency lock-in
Related:all case studieshow we build websitesdigital marketing
How it ran
From catalogue audit to launch
Map the catalogue before designing it
Every product against brand, type, concern and ingredient range — so the navigation could be decided from what was actually being sold rather than from a template's assumptions.
Design the storefront and the routes in
Home-page merchandising, brand pages, category and product templates, and the guided routine section — designed once as a system and applied across the catalogue.
Build it on WooCommerce, bilingual from the start
WordPress and WooCommerce with a custom front-end, Arabic and English built together rather than one retrofitted onto the other, and checkout wired for the Egyptian market.
Launch it and hand over the keys
Products, promotions and editorial all editable in-house, so the brand could run its own campaigns and keep publishing without coming back to us for each change.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
How do you build a bilingual Arabic and English ecommerce website?
By treating both languages as the same catalogue rather than two sites. One product record carries both languages, the layout mirrors properly into right-to-left instead of being visually flipped, and the language switch keeps the customer on the page they were reading. The Infinity store was built this way from the first sprint — Arabic added late is the version that always shows, because pricing, navigation depth and typography all have to be decided with it in mind.
Is WooCommerce a good platform for a cosmetics brand?
It is a strong fit when the catalogue is the complicated part, which in cosmetics it usually is. A beauty range wants to be browsable by brand, by product type, by concern and by ingredient range all at once, and WooCommerce leaves that taxonomy entirely under your control rather than inside a platform's fixed model. It also puts editorial and commerce in one system, which matters for a category that sells through advice.
How do you organise an online beauty catalogue by skin concern?
Concern is made a real route into the catalogue, not a filter hidden on a category page. Acne, pigmentation, dryness, dark circles, hair loss and dandruff each get their own entry point, and products are tagged against them independently of which brand or product type they belong to. A customer who knows only their symptom then lands somewhere useful, which is the majority of first-time beauty traffic.
How should a company with several brands structure one online store?
Give each brand enough identity to be recognisable and no more autonomy than that. On the Infinity store the house brands have their own pages and their own presence in the navigation, but they share one basket, one account, one checkout and one set of concern and product-type routes. The failure mode to avoid is a set of brand silos a customer has to reverse out of to keep shopping.
What does an Arabic RTL ecommerce store need that an English one does not?
A genuine right-to-left layout rather than a mirrored stylesheet — navigation, breadcrumbs, product galleries, form fields and the basket all have a correct side, and numerals, prices and Latin product names sit inside Arabic sentences without breaking direction. Arabic type also needs its own line height and weight choices; reusing the Latin typographic scale is what makes a translated store feel translated.
Should a pharma or beauty brand sell direct to consumer online?
It adds a channel rather than replacing the counter, and the case for it is usually margin plus the customer relationship — you learn who buys what, and you can reach them for the reorder. It is worth doing properly or not at all: the direct channel inherits the brand's credibility, so a slow or awkward store costs more than the sales it misses. Infinity Clinic Pharma went direct while continuing to sell through its retail points.
How do you build a skincare routine finder on an ecommerce site?
Start from how the products are actually used — cleanse, treat, moisturise, protect — and let the customer say what they are dealing with rather than what they want to buy. The output is a short ordered regimen, not a filtered grid. On the Infinity store this sits in the top-level navigation beside the shop, because a customer who needs it is precisely the one who will not get anywhere in a full product listing.
How many products can a WooCommerce store handle?
Far more than most catalogues ever reach — tens of thousands of products is routine, and the practical ceiling is hosting and query design rather than the platform. What actually degrades first is navigation, not performance: a catalogue becomes unusable to shoppers long before it becomes slow. That is why the structure work matters more than the product count.
WooCommerce or Shopify for an ecommerce store in Egypt?
WooCommerce gives you full control of the catalogue structure, no per-transaction platform fee, and ownership of the whole stack, at the cost of running and maintaining it yourself. Shopify hands you the hosting, PCI scope and updates in exchange for a monthly fee, a share of transactions and a fixed data model. Both are legitimate, and the answer changes as a business changes — this store was built and launched on WooCommerce, and the brand later moved it to Shopify as its operation grew.
How do you add a blog and content marketing to an online store?
Put it inside the same system as the catalogue so advice articles and the products they discuss can link to each other, and so the marketing team can publish without a developer. In beauty this is not optional — most of the search demand is questions rather than product names, and an article that answers one is often the only route by which a customer meets the product at all.