How to sell hair products online from your NZ salon

How do I start selling hair products online from my salon?

Start small and start with what already sells over your counter. Check each brand's rules for online selling, pick 15 to 25 products your clients already rebuy, photograph them properly, and set up NZ shipping plus click-and-collect from the salon. Price them the same online as in the salon, show prices GST-inclusive, and decide before launch how you'll keep salon and online stock in step. A Shopify store handles the checkout, payments and pickup side well, so most of the work is in those decisions, not the tech.

This guide goes through each step in the order we'd tackle it.

Can I sell my professional brands online?

Check this first, before you photograph a single bottle. Many professional haircare brands that sell through salons set conditions on how their products are sold online. Depending on the brand and your distributor, that can include whether you can sell online at all, rules on advertised prices and discounting, which images and product descriptions you can use, and whether you can list on marketplaces as well as your own site.

These rules vary by brand, change over time and sit in your account terms, so don't assume one brand works like another. The simplest way to find out:

• Ask your rep or distributor directly whether you're approved to sell their range on your own website.
• Ask for any written online retail or pricing policy, and keep a copy.
• Ask whether they supply official product images and descriptions you're allowed to use.
• Ask whether any products are salon-only or professional-use only and can't be shipped to the public.

Doing this first saves you building a store around a brand you then have to take down.

How many products should I start with?

Fewer than you think. A tight range of 15 to 25 products from your main brand is easier to photograph, easier to keep in stock and easier for a client to shop. Look at what you actually sell in the salon: the shampoo and conditioner pairs your stylists recommend every day, the styling products clients come back for, and the treatments you use on colour clients. Those are your starting range.

Leave out the slow movers, the one-off gift sets and anything you only stock in ones and twos. You can add them once the store is running and you know which products people buy online. A store with 20 products that are always in stock does better than one with 150 where half say "sold out".

Group products in a way that matches how your clients think, such as by hair concern (colour care, blonde, repair, volume, curls) rather than only by brand. That's also how your stylists recommend them in the chair, so it carries the salon conversation onto the site.

What product photos do I need?

Clean, consistent product images matter more than anything else on the page. Clients compare your store with the brand's own site and with big online retailers, so a photo taken on the reception desk under downlights won't hold up.

What works:

• A plain background, the same for every product, usually white or a light neutral.
• The same size and framing across the range, so the collection page looks tidy.
• The front label readable, with the product name and size visible.
• One or two extra images where it helps, such as texture, the back label, or the product in use in your salon.

If your brand supplies official images, check you're allowed to use them online. If you'd rather not deal with it, we offer clean product images for up to 25 products as a $149 add-on to a FOUNDR build.

Write your own short description for each product too. Two or three sentences on who it's for and how your stylists use it is more useful than a copied block of brand copy, and it helps the page stand apart in search.

How should I handle shipping and click-and-collect?

Offer both. Plenty of your online buyers will be existing clients who live nearby, and they'd rather pick up at their next appointment or on their way past.

Click-and-collect from the salon

Shopify calls this pickup in store. You turn it on for your salon as a location, set how long orders usually take to be ready, and add pickup instructions (where to collect, opening hours, whether to ask at reception). When you mark an order as ready, Shopify emails the customer to say it's ready for pickup.

A few practical points for a salon:

• Decide who on the team checks for pickup orders and packs them, and when.
• Keep packed orders in one place behind reception, labelled with the client's name and order number.
• Set the pickup time to something you'll reliably meet on a busy day, not your best case.

Shipping around NZ

Keep shipping simple to begin with. A flat rate for NZ, a separate rural delivery rate, and a free shipping threshold if your margins allow it. Choose a courier you'll actually use day to day, keep a stock of satchels or boxes that fit your common orders, and decide which day or days you'll send orders out. Liquids need to be packed so they can't leak, so tape or bag pump and flip-top lids before they go in the satchel.

Fill in your shipping and refund policies properly, including how you handle opened products and damaged deliveries. Your returns policy has to line up with NZ consumer law, so keep it plain and fair.

What do I need to know about GST?

If your salon is GST-registered, online sales are part of the same business, so your store's prices and invoices need to follow your GST settings. Inland Revenue's guidance is that you must register for GST once your turnover is, or is expected to be, at least $60,000 over 12 months.

For the store itself:

• Show prices GST-inclusive, which is what NZ shoppers expect.
• Make sure Shopify's tax settings match your registration, and put your GST number where it needs to appear on invoices.
• Decide how online sales will flow into your accounting software so your bookkeeper isn't re-entering them by hand.

Get your accountant to check the settings before launch. It's a ten-minute job for them and it's much easier than fixing a quarter of wrong returns later.

How do I keep salon and online stock in step?

This is the part salon owners most often underestimate. The same bottle can sell over the counter in the morning and online that afternoon. If the two systems don't agree, you'll sell something you don't have.

Shopify can track inventory for each product, and by default stops customers adding an item to their cart once it reaches zero. That protects you online, but only if the Shopify count is right.

Your options, from simplest to most involved:

Approach	How it works	Suits
Separate online stock	Set aside a shelf of stock just for online orders and load only that count into Shopify	Starting out, small ranges, when you want zero risk of overselling
Regular manual count	Update Shopify from your salon software's stock report on a set day each week, and keep a small buffer	Steady sellers that don't run low often
Connected or synced stock	Your salon software and Shopify share stock levels through an integration or a sync set up for you	Larger ranges and busier stores

Ask your salon software provider whether it connects to Shopify and how stock moves between them. If it doesn't, start with separate online stock or a weekly count and keep a buffer of one or two units on fast sellers. Whichever you pick, write down who does it and when, because the method only works if someone owns it.

Should online prices match the salon?

Yes. Charge the same price online as on your retail shelf. Clients will check, and a cheaper online price teaches them to stop buying in the salon, while a dearer one makes the store look like a markup. Matching prices also keeps you in line with brands that set rules on advertised pricing.

The same goes for promotions. If you run a deal, run it in both places at once, with the same start and end dates, and check it against your brand's terms first. Avoid stacking discount codes on top of sale prices, which is where margins quietly disappear.

Once the store is live, the place it earns its keep is the follow-up after an appointment: the client who loved what their stylist used can buy it again from home without waiting for their next visit. Point clients to the store on receipts, in your rebooking messages and from the chair.

What does it cost to set up a salon online store?

There are two parts: the build, and Shopify's own monthly plan, which Shopify bills you for directly. We've covered the plan costs in how much Shopify costs in NZ.

For the build, FOUNDR's website base is $990. It's one of our ready-made designs rebuilt with your logo, colours, photos and words on Shopify, and it includes an online shop for up to 25 products from one brand, along with your Home, About, Services and Contact pages, Book buttons linked to your booking system, and SEO and AI-search setup. Useful add-ons for a salon store:

• Clean product images for up to 25 products: $149
• Service menu and pricing set-up: $190
• Extra brands in the shop: available as an add-on, quoted for your range

You can pay in full, or spread the total over 3, 6, 9 or 12 months with no interest or extra fees. If you're after a large catalogue, several brands with hundreds of products, or a move from another platform, that's quoted with a free, fixed-price proposal on our price your project page.

For a look at a finished example, we built the website and Shopify store for UKIYO, a salon and haircare brand in Wānaka, and wrote up how the UKIYO store was put together. If you're also rethinking the rest of your site, our guide to salon website design in NZ covers the booking and service pages.

Next step

Before anything else, email your brand rep and ask whether you're approved to sell online and what the rules are. Then list the 20 or so products you'd start with. Once you have those two answers, you can see what a store would include on our salon websites page, or put your own package together from the $990 base.