Womens Attitudes towards Online Shopping - Dissertation Example

This essay discusses that women are traditionally responsible for household shopping. And according to several studies, shopping is a task more preferred by women and they express more favourable attitudes towards catalogue shopping and ‘brick-and-mortar’ store than men. Nevertheless, the innovative shopping medium presented by the Internet has been discovered to lead to an unusual, if not reverse, buying behaviour between women and men. Even though some studies have discovered that there is no significant disparity between non-shoppers and online shoppers as regards to gender, males were discovered to buy more online than females.

According to Alreck and Settle, the attitudes of men towards online shopping were roughly similar to or even more positive than females’ perceptions. The Internet was previously designed mostly for men and for a purposeful assessment intended for the product information and price comparison. In the recent decades online shopping has turned out to be more pleasant, with customer evaluations and testimonials and a richer array of products/services and online experience. This development has encouraged women, as well.

Furthermore, it appears that most people no longer find any considerable shortcomings of online shopping. A decade ago people were in the habit of worrying about the safety or trustworthiness of making payments online and the guarantee of delivery. These issues are no longer a problem today, with innovative means like secure online money transfers and a record of encouraging experiences (Park & Stoel 2002). As stated by Khosrowpour (2004), the progress of online shopping is distinguished by the finding that people have been allotting much more time for online activities since 1998.

In general, there are dissimilarities between the buying behaviour of men and women. Women would prefer, more than men, to look for relevant information on products/services and to be encouraged; this is the same behaviour observed in traditional shopping. Men would prefer to decide quickly. It is the shopping