در مورد تفاوت های جنسیتی در رفتار مصرف کننده برای معامله مالی آنلاین لوازم آرایشی

The popularity of the Internet has enabled a wide variety of services. Due to increasing pricing levels and material costs over years, enterprises have intended to lower their financial costs by Internet marketing and online financial transactions, by which renting cost, facility setup cost and manpower cost can be saved, and advertising cost is lowered for increasing the number of potential customers. Hence, Internet marketing and online financial transactions have become a market territory for which each enterprise competes. In the market, male consumers no longer mainly shop for 3C products online, and now are becoming more diverse in their shopping selections. Male cosmetics and skincare products comprise a market with great growth potential that is yet to be developed. The purpose of this study is to explore whether gender differences exist or not in perception, importance and satisfaction for online financial transactions of cosmetics. The online questionnaire survey method was used for this study. A total of 600 surveys were distributed. Once the invalid replies were excluded, a total of 567 effective samples were recovered. The results from this study show significant gender differences in the “amount of money spent per purchase of cosmetics”, “the most recent online purchase of cosmetics”, “the time spent on cosmetics”, “amount of money spent each month on cosmetics”, “amount of money spent per time on cosmetics”, “the time spent on buying cosmetics online” and “the satisfaction with the most recent online purchase of cosmetics”. There were also significant differences in the level of importance assigned to “brand reputation”, “fresh scent”, “natural ingredients”, “reasonable price”, “suitable skin type”, “professionalism of service personnel”, “recommended by advertising” and “ease of use”.

As the Internet and wireless network technologies have a had lot of advancement in decades, e.g., see the notable studies in [1] and [2], their increasing use has resulted in more online commercial activities, in terms of consumers navigating websites and making financial or nonfinancial transactions. The growing online consumer market allows consumers to make financial transactions online anywhere in the world regardless of their locations. The Internet therefore offers enterprises a growing market with limitless opportunities that they can tap into by providing consumers with online shopping services.1 While enterprises can efficiently and economically conduct their marketing activities through Internet, a challenge in this massive and growing market is to identify potential consumers through appropriate marketing planning and market segmentation [3]. Due to increasing pricing levels and material costs over years, enterprises have intended to lower their financial costs by Internet marketing and online financial transactions, by which renting cost, facility setup cost and manpower cost can be saved, and advertising cost is lowered for increasing the number of potential customers. Hence, Internet marketing and online financial transactions have become a market territory for which each enterprise competes, and the implementation for Internet marketing is to provide online shopping services for customers. Simply speaking, online shopping makes financial transactions over the Internet, in which electronics commerce is derived. It simplifies the process, and further saves logistics and manpower costs. It allows convenient and real-time response to the inquiries from customers, even negotiation of prices, and lowest achieved costs, to be the main line of increasing shopping services. In addition, Internet marketing and financial transactions provide services to customers with low costs, and efficiently raises the sales of the enterprises. Kalakota and Robinson [4] indicated that electronics commerce can solve financial problems, including shortening delivery time, decreasing the procurement cost, decreasing unconfirmed orders (for receiving payment first and then shipping the goods), integrating back-end system effectiveness, increasing the control ability for the supply chain, to electronizing the operations of transactions, transportation, storehouse, and payments to analyze customers’ procurement data with precise prediction on the supply to customers, etc. The Taiwanese Internet population is growing, and the time period spent online is increasing as well. Around 6.27 million people in Taiwan used the Internet frequently in 2000, and had grown to 10.25 million by 2008. The proportion of frequent Internet users in the Internet population grew from 28% in 2000 to 45% in 2008 [5]. People use the Internet for all kinds of activities like shopping through online platforms [6]. As the number of Taiwanese online consumers increases, the integration of virtual and physical channels together with the forming of the community-based word-of-mouth shopping model produces an increase in the proportion of purchases made online as well. The strength of the Taiwanese online shopping market can be seen in how its size grew explosively from NT $3.89 billion in 2004 to NT $108 billion in 2007 [6]. The data from the Institute for Information Industry (III) indicated that the majority of Taiwanese online shopping consumers made use of “auction websites” and “shopping websites”, which accounted for 56% and 47.3% of all purchases, respectively, and together made up over 90% of the whole online shopping market. The main product categories for male Taiwanese auction buyers included “Computer Software/Hardware and PDAs” as well as “Mobile Phone & Communications” at 55.3% and 43.3%, respectively. For female Taiwanese auction buyers, the main product categories included “Women’s Clothing & Accessories” and “Cosmetics and Skincare”. In 2006, for example, around 81% of the Taiwanese online shopping market was made up of travel, 3C, cosmetics and fashion products. Cosmetics had the fastest growth rate at 90%.2 The top three products purchased by male consumers were: 3C, male boutique goods, as well as books & magazines and cosmetics. It is noteworthy that Taiwanese consumers no longer mainly purchase 3C or books & magazines online and are now expanding their choices. According to the statistics made by the market researcher Euromonitor International, the sales of cosmetics-targeting people grew by over 40% between 1998 and 2003. Another market researcher Datamonitor estimated that in 2004, people spent around NT $89 billion on personal cosmetics. As compared to the saturated female skincare product market, it obviously offers an unexploited market with great growth potential [7]. In light of the above, it is discovered that cosmetics are no longer the exclusive province of women and make the causes behind the annual increases in male spending on cosmetics a topic worth examining. Most previous literature focused on the analysis of online shoppers’ level of satisfaction or analyze the marketing methods, transaction platform and key factors in online shopping (e.g., see [8] and [9]). Relatively few looked at the gender differences in online shopping importance, satisfaction, perception and behavior, though there existed some works on the differences of other traits (e.g., [10] and [11]) and the gender differences in online selling recommendation services (e.g., [12]). The main purpose of this study is to analyze the gender differences between consumers in perception, importance and satisfaction when buying cosmetics online. Although fewer innovative statistical techniques are involved in this study, a basic statistical method is sufficient to realize the gender difference of consumer behavior when buying cosmetics online. The results from the empirical analysis of this study hopefully provide the relevant government departments and online vendors with a useful reference in their decision-making. This study is divided into five sections. Section 1 gives the introduction to our study. Section 2 gives the review of literature. Section 3 gives the research methodology and survey design. Section 4 gives analysis of survey results. Section 5 consists of the conclusion and suggestions.

Due to increasing pricing levels and material costs over years, enterprises have intended to lower their financial costs by Internet marketing, by which renting cost, facility setup cost, and manpower cost can be saved, and advertising cost is lowered for increasing more potential customers. From the aspect of marketing, low advertising cost creates more potential customers. From the aspect of logistics, electronics commerce shortens the delivery, decreases the procurement cost, decreases unconfirmed orders, increases the control ability for the supply chain, electronizes the operations of transaction, transportation, storehouse, and payments to analyze customers’ procurement data with precise prediction on the supply to customers, etc. Hence, Internet marketing has become a market territory for which each enterprise competes. The results from this study show significant gender differences among consumers when purchasing cosmetics in terms of perception, importance and satisfaction. They also show that significant gender differences exist in “average amount of money spent on online shopping, “the most recent online purchase of cosmetics”, “time spent on cosmetics”, “amount of money spent each month on cosmetics”, “amount of money spent per time on cosmetics”, “the time spent buying cosmetics online”, and “satisfaction with the most recent online purchase of cosmetics”. There were also significant differences in the level of importance assigned to “brand reputation”, “fresh scent”, “natural ingredients”, “reasonable price”, “suitable skin type”, “professionalism of service personnel”, “recommended by advertising” and “ease of use”. Marital status made a statistically significant difference to the level of satisfaction with online shopping characteristics such as “not limited by time”, “reasonable delivery costs”, “elegant website design”, “easily attracted by webpage advertising”, “easy to search for products”, “diversification of products”, “easy to buy” and “price cheaper than physical stores”. As for the level of satisfaction with purchasing cosmetics online, the difference was statistically significant for “attractive packaging”, “natural ingredients”, “spokesperson” and suitable skin type”. Additionally, in comparison to male respondents, as female respondents attached a higher level of importance to “security of online transactions”, online vendors should therefore offer more secure transaction methods for female consumers. Online payment validation should also be used to provide consumers with a more secure payment method. For the “Price” dimension, as compared to male respondents, female respondents exhibited a higher level of satisfaction, which implied relatively higher prices for male cosmetic products. This study, therefore, suggests that online vendors offer better prices on male cosmetic products or offer different discount methods to make male consumers more likely to shop online. As for “the website content is provided for reference only”, “product delivery speed”, “worried about product guarantee” and “questions about the seller’s quality of service”, male respondents scored higher than female respondents, so online vendors should consider providing more detailed explanations for female consumers and also providing faster and more convenient services for female products. Finally, more comprehensive after-sales support and quality guarantees should be offered to make female consumers more likely to shop online. As for perceived importance of “brand reputation”, the score was higher among male consumers. This suggests that male consumers pay more attention to the brand reputation of cosmetics when shopping online. Online vendors should, therefore, seek to build a good product reputation for male consumers in order to increase their chances of buying cosmetics online. Here the product’s “fresh scent”, “natural ingredients”, “reasonable prices”, “suitable skin type”, “professionalism of service personnel”, “recommended by advertising” and “ease of use” show a higher level of perceived importance among female consumers. Online vendors should, therefore, target female consumers by providing products that have a fresher scent, more natural ingredients, more reasonable pricing, and are more suited to female consumers’ skin types. Services, advertising and the method of use need to be better tailored to female consumers as well to increase their chances of purchasing cosmetics online.