Gender differences in shoppers’ behavioural reactions to ultra-low price tags at online merchants

Mistakenly-tagged low prices are harmful to online merchants but difficult to avoid completely, thus it is meaningful to track shoppers’ abnormal response to them and develop resolutions accordingly. In light of relevant issues received rare attention from both practitioners and researchers, this work aimed to identify shoppers’ typical behavioural reactions to ultra-low prices at Internet merchants, and further investigate gender differences in particular behavioural aspects. A consensus-based positional voting system, the modified Borda count and the Pareto analysis were applied to profile general shoppers’ behavioural responses. A survey was conducted to measure the intensity of subjects’ intention toward the identified behavioural aspects. Analysis using independent samples t-tests were performed to investigate gender differences in these reactions. Besides providing an insight into shoppers’ behavioural reactions to ultra-low prices at Internet storefronts, this work provides practitioners a basis for developing resolutions that are adaptive to customer populations with different proportions of male to female.