Speciality clothing and accessories retailer supports international and multichannel growth with address management
Speciality clothing and accessories retailer supports international and multichannel growth with address management
Forever 21 Inc. has a strong reputation making the hottest and most current fashion trends available to customers at great value.
The company is headquartered in Los Angeles and operates over 480 stores worldwide including its first UK store and e-commerce site, which opened in November 2010.
Opening its store at the famous Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham was the first step for Forever 21, in the fast moving and highly competitive UK fashion market. The next important milestone is launching in London’s Oxford Street, renowned for its High Street fashion. However, in retail today it is just as important to have strong presence online as well as these high profile flagship stores.
Providing multichannel experience
With fierce competition just one a click away, the success of Forever 21’s new UK website hinged not only on offering the latest fashions at the right price, but also in making the online experience enjoyable and easy to buy from, for the savvy, stylish consumer.
A crucial part of the online purchasing process is making the final transaction at the checkout as simple and straightforward as possible, reducing the time it takes to complete the transaction. “We needed a software solution that could be fully integrated into our ecommerce site, to ensure every customer address is rapidly validated at the point of entry,” explained IT associate manager at Forever 21, Jae-Won Min.
“Having this information correct is not only important to complete the transaction, it is vital to ensure the products are delivered on time and to the right address. It also ensures our customer database is populated with accurate and clean address information which we can use for future correspondence and marketing activities.”
Having considered a number of different options, Forever 21 selected Capscan and its web-based address management software, Matchcode Webnet. The fact that Matchcode Webnet can be integrated into any web page or browser-based application was appealing, given the tight development schedule Forever 21 was working with in order to launch the new website in November 2010.
Reconciling data format differences
Min said: “One of the first challenges that we faced was understanding the different address formats in the UK. We specifically needed to find an address management company that could provide validation services for both UK and EU and Capscan demonstrated very strong capabilities in this field.”
Today, when a customer visits Forever 21’s website and has finished filling their shopping basket they navigate to the checkout and sign-in if they are an existing customer, or register their details as a new customer. When prompted on the online form they simply enter a postcode or partial address and Matchcode Webnet provides the customer with a dropdown list of addresses associated with that postcode. Upon selection of the address the relevant field in the order form are populated with the customers full and correct postal address, which has been validated against the Royal Mail’s definitive Postcode Address File (PAF) of 28.2 million UK addresses.
During the short implementation time Capscan and Forever 21 worked closely together to agree how the address information should be displayed on the customer’s screen and what fields of data needed to be captured.
“We were really impressed with the speed and accuracy at which the software returns all matching addresses when the customer enters their postcode,” stated Min on what impressed him most about Matchcode Webnet. He concluded: “Capscan and Matchcode Webnet meets all our needs, wants and expectations and we would certainly recommend the company and its address management solutions to other retailers.”
