Gender Differences Of Consumer Decision-making In Online Shopping Festival

In recent years,the sales volume of online shopping festival has been increasing year by year.Online shopping festival has become the big event for e-commerce.The consumer decision-making during the shopping festival has also drawn the attention of scholars and merchants.C urrently,the studies of online shopping festival are limited,and most papers focus on consumer motivation and satisfaction.Studies on consumer decision-making focus the purchase decision and ignore the multi-stage nature of consumer decision-making.Moreover,these papers are mainly from the overall perspective.In fact,due to the diversity of consumers,the effect of online shopping festival on consumer is different.The papers on information search behavior mainly analyze influencing factors and capability perception,etc.Few studies have analyzed the relationship between information search and purchase decision.The data of the relevant studies are survey data that can't objectively measure consumer's website browsing behavior.Therefore,this paper uses the clickstream data to reflect the characteristics of consumer behavior at each stage of the decision-making process.O n the one hand,we draw upon the five-stage consumer decision-making process and the stimulus–organism–response model to develop an integrative framework,also apply the difference-in-differences method to test the effects of online shopping festival,aiming to find the effects of online shopping festival on consumers' search,evaluation and purchase behavior and the gender differences of the effects.In addition,by combining gender and age characteristics,we further segmented the consumer groups,verifying the stability of results,and analyzed the gender differences in the influence of online shopping festival on consumers in different age groups.On the other hand,we use gender as the moderator to analyze the relationship between information search and purchase decision,and conducted a comparative analysis of online shopping festival and ordinary days.The results show that during the online shopping festival,consumers spend more energy on information search,reduce hedo nic browsing behavior and the purchasing purpose is more explicit.Affected by the online shopping festival,female's information needs change more than male.Moreover,female's participation in online shopping festivals is higher than that of men,and they are more likely to stock up.However,the diversity of purchase needs is not significantly different from that of male.In addition,young and middle-aged consumers have a high degree of participation in online shopping festivals,and purchase needs change more than other consumers.The gender differences in consumer decision-making over the high age group are higher than those of other age groups.In addition,the impact of information search on purchase decision is significant,both in online shopping festival and ordinary days.However,the moderating effects of gender are different in terms of significance and magnitude,and the moderating effects are stronger in the context of online shopping festival.Based on the consumer shopping log data,from the perspective of the multi-stage behavior of consumer decision-making process,the impact of online shopping festival is revealed.This paper makes up the limitations of the questionnaire research,and reflects consumer behavior more objectively and more comprehensively.Moreover,our specific focus on gender differences in consumer decision-making expands gender differences in cons umer behavior and addresses market segmentation issues.O n the other hand,the conclusions are of guiding significance for the merchants to formulate the targeted marketing strategy based on the characteristics of target customers during the online shopping festival.As we know,female's purchasing needs in online shopping festivals is higher than that of men,and they are more likely to stock up.So,according to female's purchase preferences,merchants can determine the promotion of product categories and promotional efforts.Moreover,the moderating effects of gender are stronger in the context of online shopping festival,which emphasized the importance of market segmentation during the online shopping festival.