Gender effects on online purchase and return behaviour: an experimental study

This paper reports the results from a randomized and controlled field experiment with 4,000 real e-customers as test subjects. The aim was to investigate how gender moderates the impact of delivery and return policies on purchase and return behavior in e-commerce. We ran the experiment in cooperation with nelly.com, a Nordic e-commerce site that specializes in fashion and beauty. The main conclusion is that gender to some extent moderates purchase and return behavior among e-customers. However, these effects seem too small and sometimes too complex in terms of their interaction with delivery and return conditions to be exploitable by e-tailers from a practical perspective. In other words, the statistically significant gender effects observed here are insignificant in practice. Hence, the results do not support the idea of customer segmentation based on gender regarding the delivery and return conditions offered by online retailers