A Study on Influences of Gender Differences on Social Presence Features

With the increase in Internet-based sales, attracting and retaining online customers has become the most important part of running a successful business. In order to maintain customer loyalty, website designers should consider providing gender sensitized user experience as men and women have been known to have different perceptions of online shopping.  Women tend to prefer shopping experience that creates connection with other humans. Online shopping experience, in general, can be perceived as lacking human warmth and sociability as it is devoid of interactions with other humans. However, to date, influence of social presence (interpreting human warmth and contact electronically) on e-Loyalty across genders has been relatively underexplored. In this research-in-progress paper, we present a research model to study the effects of gender differences on social presence cues in retail websites.  As a part of future work, we plan to use survey methodology to analyze and validate the research model.