Hollister Launches Share2Pay to Encourage Online Sales

Hollister is rolling out a new system that lets shoppers pass their carts to someone else for payment. The system, called Share2Pay, aims to smooth over a common point of friction for young online Hollister shoppers. Teenage customers without access to online payments or credit cards of their own often load their carts with products but give up trying to buy them because they lack a way to pay.

“There was a lot of lost sales on the table,” said Samir Desai, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Abercrombie & Fitch Co.

The Share2Pay system will initially only be available to customers in the U.S. and U.K. using the Hollister app. It lets shoppers send their shopping carts to the ultimate buyer via text message in lieu of a traditional checkout mechanism. Buyers can choose to delete or edit certain items for size and color before entering their card details to pay in the app.

Share2Pay aims to encourage more Hollister customers to convert their shopping bags into sales by removing a tangible obstacle to payment—a lack of credit card. Early tests of the system found customers in the pilot group were two times more likely to place an order than those who weren’t.

The in-house development of Share2Pay is an example of the company’s efforts to operate more like a tech company in some ways.

“We’re putting things in the hands of the customer and then getting feedback and iterating, versus going away for nine months in the lab and building something that’s going to be unbelievably perfect,” Desai said. “We might have missed the boat on customer experience at that point.”

More from Loyalty360 featuring Hollister/Abercrombie:

Recent Content

Membership and Pricing

Videos and podcasts

Membership and Pricing