Women could stimulate e-commerce growth

Friday, February 8, 2013 - 11:18 by Mike Price

A new report suggests that the importance of female consumers to the online retail market could continue to expand over the coming years.

The study, commissioned by VoucherCodes.co.uk, has discovered that women are more likely to make purchases via safe shopping online based on ads and offers that they receive.

While just 42 per cent of male respondents said that they will primarily be using online outlets to purchase a wide variety of products in the future, just over 50 per cent of women said that e-commerce was their first port of call.

This means that a generation of web-savvy female consumers will be responsible for the majority of the money that is spent via safe shopping online, over the coming years.

This is sure to lead marketers to target this audience more thoroughly with e-commerce promotions, since the smaller proportion of male users will not be as worthy of attention, according to Marketing Week.

Almost a third of the men questioned in the study said that they had never bought an item of clothing through a website, compared to the 81 per cent of women, who have splashed out on fashion items online.

This area of the retail market presents the starkest difference between the genders when it comes to online spends, although there are other discrepancies.

Over the course of 2013, analysts predict that Brits will spend about 87 billion via e-commerce sites. If this study is representative of the entire online population, then women will be investing more than men in web-based retail.

Similar reports have found that female consumers are also more likely to share the deals that they find through social networking sites, which makes them valuable to companies who want to run effective promotions and reach nationwide audiences.