Gender effect on e-commerce sales of experience gifts: Preliminary empirical findings

Gender effect on e-commerce sales of experience gifts: Preliminary empirical findings

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  Gender effect one-commerce sales of experience gifts Preliminary empirical findings Joni Salminen, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU; and Turku School of Economics Sarem Seitz, Otto-Friedrich University Bamberg Bernard J. Jansen, Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU Tommi Salenius, Parcero The 17th International Conference on Electronic Business, Dubai, December 4-8.
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  Purpose Despite new targetingcriteria (intent, interests), demographic criteria are still widely applied in the industry. Often, this makes sense because the product naturally matches with specific genders or ages. In this work, we explore how gender influences online purchase behavior of consumers buying experience gifts.
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  Purpose RQ1: How doe-commerce purchases of experience gifts split between men and women? RQ2: Do the products bought differ by gender? If so, how? RQ3: Is there a difference in the use of discount codes between the genders?
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  Data • We collected493 e-commerce purchases from 2017 • Variables: • Product purchased • Price • Final price (if equal to Price, discount code use = 0) • Product category • Gender • Labelled gender and product category manually • E-commerce store sells experience gift cards (e.g., tandem jump, rally driving, dinner in the dark).
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  Analysis We used statisticaltesting to compare differences between men and women. These included ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis, and log-linear models, according to the nature of the data. All tests were performed with p-values below 0.05 being statistically significant.
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  Data Female account for65% and male 35% of purchases
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  Findings: price Men tendto buy slightly more expensive experience gifts, but the difference is not statistically significant.
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  Findings: product categories Frequencyof purchases by category and gender. Statistical analysis did not find significant differences.
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  Findings: use ofdiscount codes Estimate Std. error Z value Pr(>|z|) (Intercept) 4.61616 0.05415 85.255 < 2e-16 *** Gender 0.26226 0.05415 4.844 1.28e-06 *** Discount -0.55040 0.05415 -10.165 < 2e-16 *** Gender:Discount -0.10851 0.05415 -2.004 0.0451 * Signif. codes: 0 '***' 0.001 '**' 0.01 '*' 0.05 '.' 0.1 ' ' 1 A regression model shows that a male customer is, on average, around 1.38 times more likely to use a discount coupon than a female customer.
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  Conclusions • Based onthe findings, it seems that the online purchase behavior of experience gifts between males and females is not drastically different regarding type of and price of experience gifts they purchase. • Rather than gender, interests are more likely to drive purchase behavior. • The exception is customers’ use of discount codes, in which we found that men are significantly more likely to use discount codes (about 1.38 times more than women on average). • This suggests men are more discount-sensitive than women.
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  Recommendations for e- commecemanagers 1. Focus on targeting criteria that most effectively drives behavior (e.g., intent- or interest-based targeting) 2. Examine how gender differences show in purchase behavior, especially in the use of discount coupons 3. Adjust messaging and targeting accordingly.
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  Thank you!