Men vs Women: How They Shop Online [Infographic]

Contextual commerce is all about delivering a more relevant experience based on what you know about a visitor. New vs returning visits, geolocation, past browse and purchase history, device type and referring source are useful pieces of context. And if you can identify gender, this may also influence the contextual experience.

The folks at Minewhat suggest certain features and content appeal more to the respective genders, presented in today's infographic.

While it's risky to make generalizations based on this data (several stats are quite close between the sexes, and there's no cited source for the data), I chose this infographic this week to get you thinking of how commerce experiences could be tweaked or tailored for men and women differently, even if it's as simple as serving a slightly different product page template.

For example, if a site's male shoppers tend to exhibit more "spearfishing" behavior, rather than browsing categories thoroughly, a merchandiser may experiment with showing fewer or no cross-sells on the product page, and rather present a last-minute offer for a featured product before checkout.

Of course, each gender-specific hypotheses should be tested. If your existing testing and targeting tools can't accommodate, tests can be run on email campaigns when gender can be segmented for. For example, detailed product descriptions within email targeted to men, vs. visuals and "social proof" to women.