eCommerce Alert: Who does the actual shopping in Nigeria? Men or Women?

 

…This will be a short post, but I will look at exploring this topic fully in the near future

So I love shopping online, and as I was recently shopping for groceries on konga.com, I suddenly started thinking about what would happen when I finally get married; would I still be able to shop online, or will my wife prefer to do all our shopping offline while driving down from work.

I decided that this would actually be a valid question to be considered by online marketers;

Who makes the shopping decisions? Or who does the actual shopping? Who do we want to make the shopping decisions?

 
These are all individual posts on their own and I will be looking at exploring them when I have some free time.

Several decisions are made by online marketing gurus about buying behaviours/patterns of consumers, and huge marketing budgets are committed into perceived trends. I am a big data man, and believe there are several opportunities that lie in understanding big data for companies in Africa.

Now to quote a statement from a new Wharton research; “When it comes to shopping, women are from Nordstrom’s and men are from Sears”, Women love to spend long hours going clothes, accessories, and can spend many hours checking through different categories, but for men they know exactly what they want and don’t like to stay in the store for too long

In a study titled, “Men Buy, Women Shop,” researchers at Wharton’s Jay H. Baker Retail Initiative and the Verde Group, a Toronto consulting firm, found that women react more strongly than men to personal interaction with sales associates. Men are more likely to respond to more utilitarian aspects of the experience — such as the availability of parking, whether the item they came for is in stock, and the length of the checkout line.

“Women tend to be more invested in the shopping experience on many dimensions,” says Robert Price, chief marketing officer at CVS Caremark and a member of the Baker advisory board. “Men want to go to Sears, buy a specific tool and get out.”

I asked a friend, Adebimpe Familusi and she smiled before talking about how that Women love to physically shop, she said “they want to see, feel, (taste and smell) whatever they want to buy and most especially they want to be able to haggle, because haggling is fun!

Now how does all this information help the online marketer make decisions, how does konga.com ensure that my wife does not decide to do the shopping while coming back from work?

As more people move away from traditional target age groups of online shopper, what can be done to ensure that they continue shopping online?

So I am throwing this question out before a follow up post sharing my views.

Tweet at me: @IfeanyiAbraham