Forever 21 caters to Gen Z shoppers

With a mobile, Gen Z shopper, the checkout page has to be fast, says Jacob Hawkins, chief marketing officer, digital at apparel retail chain Forever 21.

“We have a Gen Z customer and she wants it, and she wants it now,” Hawkins says. “She is very tech savvy. She wants to check out quickly, and Bolt just lines up with that.”

Bolt refers to Forever 21’s checkout page provider Bolt Financial Inc. The merchant launched the technology in 2019 but has had a turbulent relationship with it. Authentic Brands Group, which owns Forever 21, sued Bolt in March 2022, alleging that Bolt failed to provide its promised technology. In July 2022, the case was settled, and Authentic Brands Group was awarded an undisclosed stake in Bolt.

In a February 2023 phone interview with both Forever 21 and Bolt, Hawkins says, “We have a good partnership right now. And that’s all in the past.” The Bolt spokesperson says, “They are only looking forward.”

In fact, the companies are now touting Forever 21’s positive results from using Bolt: A shopper who checks out with Bolt can complete checkout in 100 seconds, which is 43 seconds faster than the guest checkout on Forever21.com. And that’s “an eternity,” Hawkins says.

“No one wants to go a store and stand in line to check out. And on a website, no one wants to wait a long time,” Hawkins says.

And shoppers leave if it takes too long:

• The cart abandonment rate is 37% for shoppers who used Bolt to check out in 2022, compared with 60% for shoppers who use the guest checkout.
• Put another way: 63% of shoppers who start the checkout process using Bolt finish and make the purchase, compared with just 40% of shoppers who make it to completion using guest checkout.

“The longer time it takes, the fewer people make it through,” Hawkins says.

Digital Commerce 360 data also finds younger shoppers are more likely to abandon their carts compared with other online shoppers. 13% of shoppers ages 18-29 say they’ve abandoned their shopping cart specifically because the process was too long compared with 9% of all online shoppers in the survey, according to a Digital Commerce 360/Bizrate Insights survey of 1,060 online shoppers in January 2023.

Bolt is faster because there are fewer fields to fill out. When a shopper goes to check out on Forever21.com, she enters her email and phone number into the checkout page fields. If she is a previous Bolt shopper, the site recognizes her and sends her a one time pass code via SMS. The shopper enters this code on Forever21.com, her billing and shipping information is populated and she can hit purchase.