Press release

It's official - men shop more than women!

SciVisum study reveals men shop more online - but eTailers beware, men are quickest to abandon sluggish websites

7 September, 2006

Twice as many men as women shop online daily and are the biggest spenders, with 15 per cent splashing out £5000 or more on a single purchase. Stereotypically, men are the most likely to take risks online, choosing to gamble and to splurge on expensive items ranging from cars to houses. Men are also less influenced by brands.

Men are more prone to “web rage”, being the least tolerant of poorly performing websites. Only one in five would give a sluggish website a second chance before turning to a competitor.

Women shopped online less frequently than men and spent less money, with only one in four women willing to spend £100 or more on a single purchase online. The majority of women instead spend their money on smaller items such as books, CDs, groceries and clothes.

These are the key findings of the Male/Female eCommerce study undertaken across the UK by web testing specialist SciVisum. Whilst 75 per cent are now shopping online, eTailers are warned they could lose customers of both sexes if they don’t address performance issues surrounding website crashes and complicated registrations processes.

Men are the biggest spenders

By volume, more women (75 per cent) than men (65 per cent) shop online. However, men are the biggest spenders and shop most frequently, with twice as many men shopping daily as women. Instead, the majority of women (34 per cent) shop online for special occasions. Women were found to have an average spend of only £77 per month, versus £101 for men.

Men were also the biggest single item splurgers, with 38 per cent spending £1000 on a single item, and three quarters having spent more than £500 on a single item. 15 per cent of men confessed to splurging £5000 or more on a single item, versus only one in twenty women. Nearly half of women surveyed (46 per cent) have never spent more than £100 on a single purchase.

“Surprisingly, men are the biggest online spenders – but the worry for eTailers is that they simply won’t tolerate any blips,” said Deri Jones, CEO, SciVisum. “With less than a fifth of men prepared to give even their favourite website a second chance, the message to eTailers is very clear. Online shoppers are showing zero tolerance to poor performance – and eTailers must follow this lead if they’re to avoid losing their customers to competitors or the high street.”

Stereotypical buying habits

Both men and women appear to be adhering to traditional stereotypes when it comes to shopping online. Men are more likely to buy electrical goods, cars, financial services and houses whilst women are more likely to buy clothes and holidays. Women are also more likely to use the internet for sending gifts.

Men are six times as likely to be online gamblers as women. 26 per cent admitted to using the internet to bet online versus only 7 per cent of women. Similarly online gaming was a bigger draw for men than women. A quarter of men say they compete in online gaming compared to only 4 per cent of women.

Men were also more likely to use online financial services, with nearly a third (27 per cent) using them, versus less than one in five (17 per cent) women. However, dating, government services and tax returns were as big a draw for both sexes – nearly one in five has tried online dating, and 15 per cent file their taxes online.

When asked about their most bizarre purchase, women were more likely to purchase luxury items, including chocolates, champagne, flowers, opera tickets, silk or vintage clothes and even a spa break in France. Men on the other hand fell into two extreme camps: the practical, such as climbing shoes, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows and garden fences, versus the peculiar, including an absinthe making kit, a batman fancy dress costume and a blow up dinosaur.

Web rage

Men are more likely to suffer “web rage” and far less likely to give a poorly performing website a second chance. 38 per cent of male online shoppers complained that frustration with sluggish performance has led them to turn off their computer. Only one in five men would give even their favourite website more than a second chance, before trying out the competition or turning back to the high street.

The major gripe for male online shoppers is a website crashing (50 per cent) whilst women cited complicated registration processes as being the most likely to cause annoyance.

Why are they shopping online?

Men appear to be the bargain hunters of the online shopping world, saying they choose the online experience to try and get the best price for items, whereas women go online to speed up their shopping experience.

Women rated crowded stores as a major top turn off when high street shopping and the biggest influence behind their decision to shop online, whereas fuel prices and busy roads are more likely to persuade men to search the web. For those of both sexes who currently avoid online shopping altogether, preferring to stick to the high street, friends bragging about their bargains would be the main motivator to go online.

Men are more fickle when it comes to brand loyalty, with the majority choosing to buy from unknown websites, which only a third of women were prepared to do. For women who were willing to chance a non-branded website, security and price are the main considerations.

Recommendations

Based on the findings, SciVisum made a number of broad recommendations for eTailers to improve their performance:

1. Simple uptime/downtime monitoring of your home page and/or a few main pages simply won't reveal how the shopping transactions are behaving.
Nor will Web Analytics, vital as it is, show the sporadic slow-downs and hidden errors that impact a percentage of your users.
24/7 functional monitoring, running multi-page User Journeys that mimic real users' product finding and purchasing transactions on-line is what is required. Ensure that these KPI metrics are measuredfor all your money-making Journeys (Product Search, Add-to-Basket, CheckOut etc)
For the eCommerce engineers:
2. Review key transactions such as the 'add to cart' function of your website - to ensure that the server and database load is kept to a minimum. Firstly watch out for HTTP 'POST' data bloat, so that only essential variables are passed within it, such as the product part number; and secondly avoid adding or changing cookies and sessionIDs during the crucial later stages of the purchase process.
3. Analyse web systems for software ‘race condition’s or 'database locking' type flaws, which can produce sporadic errors even at load levels well below the capacity of the server hardware, and do not go away even after hardware upgrades.4. Be aware that although 'add to cart' functions may perform well in 'once off' or 'normal use' testing, only simulated-user load/stress testing of the functionality will expose underlying problems that cause more sporadic failures; even 1% failure during busy periods is 10 times higher than 99.9% Service Level Agreement requires.
5. Whether managed in-house or out-sourced, your web site is likely evolving and changing all the time, to respond to marketing demands, and to add to capacity and performance. These changes often cause inadvertent decline in user experience and transactional effectiveness. Thus the IT and marketing team managers should agree an ongoing program of testing and monitoring, to allow evidence-based decision making on future upgrades; the test regime should include 24/7 functional monitoring, regular stress tests, perhaps twice-yearly, and ad hoc trouble-shooting audits say yearly to ensure the overall design and infrastructure is not losing its edge.

Methodology

SciVisum surveyed 1000 people between the ages of 18 and 60 at mainland stations across the UK. Questions examined buying and spending habits; frequency of online shopping; attitudes to online shopping; and attitudes to online delivery and customer service.

The SciVisum Male/Female eCommerce Study 2006 management report with full details of the findings, issues raised and recommendations for retail companies can be requested from: http://www.scivisum.co.uk/report/malefemale2006.
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About SciVisum
SciVisum is a UK based web site testing specialist, helping clients to reduce lost sales online by identifying where and when user experience suffers.

The services provide vital data not available by web-analytics or other web monitoring:

* when invisible errors impact users but are invisible to the in-house teams
* when wrong or missing page content forces users to abandon their purchase journeys
* what % of marketing campaign traffic is lost due to under-capacity in one or more vital steps such as 'add to basket' or 'checkout' pages.

The company's services measure the performance and functionality of client's business-critical on-line systems. Using the multi-page User Journeys approach to measurement, SciVisum's metrics provide real time KPIs and act as a common language between the business and marketing teams who work daily with journey concepts of Add-to-Basket, Checkout, Register, pay-online, login and etc; and the web technical teams who need precise input as to which step of which journey is under-performing, when and how, in order for them to most effectively apply technical resources to close the problem gaps.

Through SciVisum's testing and recommendations, clients are able to substantially increase visitor rates and customer satisfaction levels by achieving gains in key journey delivery times, increasing ability to handle peak load levels, and reducing sporadic but user-numbing error rates of 1 to 5% that most sites un-wittingly force on their users.

Clients come from a wide range of sectors and include Tesco, Premium Bonds, Health Protection Agency, Skipton Building Society, Cameron McKenna, Boden, T-Mobile, Shell, British Library, Hertfordshire Council, Scottish & Southern Energy, Eversheds, CodeMasters, PlayMonday lottery, The Stationery Office, National Savings and Investment Bank and uSwitch.

Test deliverables include: Load testing /Stress testing: SV-Load; 24/7 functional monitoring of complex multi-page User Journeys: SV-Monitor; Accessibility testing to the WAI guidelines: SV-Access; Functionality & troubleshooting audits and consultancy: SV-Function.

Media contact:
Emma Ballard/Sarra Mander
Rainier PR
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7494 6570
Email: eballard@rainierpr.co.uk/smander@rainierpr.co.uk

Media contacts

Emma Ballard/Sarra Mander
Rainier PR
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7494 6570
Email: eballard@rainierpr.co.uk/smander@rainierpr.co.uk