THE ROLE OF GENDER IN ONLINE SHOPPING- A LITERATURE REVIEW

The development of Internet has resulted in enormous businessprospects and opportunities and given new direction to traditional commercialactivities. E- Commerce emerged as the need of the hour. The business-toconsumer (B2C) is the most visible and prominent progeny of e-commerce. B2C is a commercial process that starts with companies and ends with end consumers. Online shopping is an emerging area in the field of E-Business and is surelygoing to be the future of shopping in the world. The benefits of online shopping are well known. The most common incentives for consumers to shop online areconvenience, competitive pricing, greater access to information, complementarilyof traditional stores and broader selections. Most of the companies are runningtheir online portals to selltheir products/services online. Though online shoppinghas made enormous progressoutside India, its growth in the Indian market, which is a large and diverse consumer market, is still not in line with the global market.On-line shopping in India is significantly affected by various demographic factors like age, gender, marital status, family size and income. Substantial amount of research work has been carried out on all these areas. The impact of these factorson online shopping behavior is fascinating to say the least. But the most mysterious of them all is the impact of gender on the acceptance or rejection of online shopping. Do men and women behave differently during the online shopping processes or do they exhibit same kinds of behavior during this process?This article will try to throw some light on the extremely valuable but oftenneglected role of gender in the online shopping behavior of consumers.