What Gen Z Shopping Behavior Reveals About Brand Trust

Key takeaways for brand marketers

• Physical stores are brand proof. Even among online-first shoppers, stores remain one of Gen Z’s strongest signals of quality, credibility and trustworthiness.

• Value and reliability now work together. Pricing leads decisions, but shipping speed, availability, usability and tracking help close them.

• Gen Z influence is bigger than the individual buyer. They shape household purchases and recommend brands far more often in private conversations than public social posts.

Gen Z has been labeled a digital-first audience for so long that the term no longer tells the full story. Our latest research shows a generation that shops online by default, uses physical stores to validate trust, weighs value against reliability and recommends brands most often in private conversations. The opportunity for marketers isn’t choosing a winning channel. It’s understanding the role each one plays in earning confidence, closing the sale and fueling influence from one shopper to the next.

Why do physical stores remain Gen Z’s trust signal?

Nearly three-quarters of Gen Z say they do most of their shopping online. Yet 69% trust brands more when they have physical stores. The same percentage believe brands with stores offer higher-quality products, and 59% are more likely to try a new brand if they can visit a location in person.

For Gen Z, stores aren’t just places to buy. A physical presence validates the claims made by a website, marketplace presence or social content. That reframes brick and mortar as trust infrastructure: a driver of credibility, trial and awareness. The value of a store extends beyond the transaction; it can make a brand feel more established, easier to trust and more worth trying.

How should brands think about each channel’s role?

The data points to a clear division of labor. In-store meets the emotional needs — confidence, easy returns and quality assurance. Online meets the practical needs — variety, convenience and price.

That is why so many categories show a mix rather than a winner. Groceries, health and wellness, and home improvement still skew heavily in-store, where freshness and immediacy matter. Apparel, electronics, home décor and hobby goods live in both worlds, with Gen Z often researching in one channel and buying in another. Some products simply are not made for a forced digital path; pushing them there creates friction, not progress.

 Brands should stop treating stores and digital as interchangeable paths to purchase. Stores build confidence, while digital delivers convenience — and together, they create a buying experience that feels both reassuring and effortless.

What matters most to Gen Z when shopping online?

Price still leads: 75% cite pricing as a top factor in choosing where to shop online, and 60% point to deals and discounts. That reflects the economic reality this generation is navigating.

After pricing, Gen Z looks for signals that a brand can deliver on its promise: shipping speed (56%), product availability (51%), variety, ease of experience and package tracking (44% each). Gen Z is not trading value for reliability. They see both as visible proof that a brand can be trusted.

Where does Gen Z shop online now?

Large online marketplaces remain the front door, but Gen Z is not homogeneous.

• Older Gen Z (20-29) is significantly more likely to shop large marketplaces (75% vs. 64%)

• Younger Gen Z (16-19) over-indexes on online-only fashion retailers (32% vs. 25%) and resale platforms (33% vs. 29%).

• Direct-from-brand traffic is nearly identical across both groups at roughly 39% — one of the most encouraging findings in the set.

When Gen Z already knows and trusts a brand, they still go straight to it. Marketplace presence remains important for reach, comparison, convenience and tracking, but younger Gen Z’s broader shopping mix points to a bigger opportunity: build a brand strong enough to be searched directly, flexible enough to show up across discovery environments and reliable enough to earn the repeat visit.

How much does Gen Z influence household purchases?

Gen Z is already shaping purchases in the categories fast-moving brands care about most. They hold sway over their parents’ restaurant choices (51%), packaged food and beverage purchases (46%) and home items (40%).Among friends, their influence holds even more power in categories like:

• entertainment and experiences (53%),

• restaurants (52%)

• apparel (48%)

Brands often see Gen Z as a future growth audience. The data suggests they are already influencing what households try, where groups go and which brands are considered. They’re both consumer and conduit — a path to purchase that often reaches beyond their own wallet.

Where does Gen Z word of mouth happen?

Perhaps the most overlooked finding is where brand advocacy actually happens. Nearly half (46%) of Gen Z regularly recommends brands to friends and family, yet only 22% frequently introduce brands to their social followers.

The implication is significant: marketers may be undervaluing private sharing behaviors.

While the public feed may create visibility, the group chat, text threads and family conversations around the dinner table are increasingly where consideration takes shape and decisions get made.

Gen Z also acts as the household’s tech translator with 38% regularly helping their parents shop online. Influence strategy should account for what cannot be seen publicly. The stronger play is to create reasons and mechanisms for private sharing: useful offers, easy referral paths, product drops worth texting about, helpful content that solves a real decision and brand moments personal enough to drop in the group chat.  

What should brands do with these Gen Z shopping insights?

The opportunity to connect around how Gen Z actually moves: across channels, into households and through private conversations. These moves matter most:

• Treat stores as credibility engines. Measure physical presence for confidence, trial, discovery and assisted conversion — not only direct sales.

• Win value and reliability together. Price gets Gen Z’s attention, but availability, speed, tracking and ease drive purchase.

• Design for private influence. Make campaigns, offers and experiences easy to send, recommend and act on inside family conversations and group chats.

• Connect planning across the journey. Retail, ecommerce, marketplace, media, social and CRM have to ladder up to one connected decision experience.

Gen Z is not a digital-only consumer. They are channel-fluent, household-influencing and privately persuasive. Brands that connect online convenience, physical credibility, marketplace reliability, direct brand equity and private word of mouth will be better positioned to earn the first purchase — and the next recommendation. Need a partner who can put your brand top of mind for Gen Z?  Hiebing can help. Email Nate Tredinnick at ntredinnick@hiebing.com to set up a call.