We came across this interesting claim from John Lewis that it expects to sell more electrical goods to women than men for the first time this Christmas. In order to test their prediction, I looked at the demographics of our Shopping and Classifieds – Appliances and Electronics category for the last 4 weeks, as well as the same period over the last 4 years.

As you can see, the gap is closing - but we’re not quite there yet. In fact, when you take into consideration the growth of women online over the same period, the gap has actually increased. As the graph below illustrates, the representation of female visitors to the category against the online population as a whole decreased last year.

However, there is a further plot twist that may prove John Lewis correct after all. The demographic data in the two previous charts is for specialist electronics retailers only, and therefore excludes visits to department stores such as John Lewis and Amazon. Women accounted for 54.6% of visitors to our Shopping and Classifieds - Department Stores category during the same period, over indexing relative to the online population. And online department stores are certainly selling electrical goods – the six most popular non-navigational search terms (i.e. product names rather than retailer names) currently sending traffic to the category are: ‘nintendo wii’, ‘wii’, ‘nintendo ds’, ‘nintendo ds lite’, ‘nintendo ds console’ and ‘ipod nano’.

So maybe the answer is that women prefer to purchase their electricals at department stores and high street chains, whereas men prefer the more specialist shops. Certainly, analyzing a selection of the top electricals retailers this seems to be the case: ebuyer, Maplin and Dabs are all more popular with men than women, while the opposite is true for Currys, Carphone Warehouse, and Asda Electricals. It is also interesting to look at the top 10 product search terms sending traffic to the electrical retailers that are most over indexed amongst men (eBuyer) and women (Asda Electricals). Boys, it seems, will always be boys (with their toys), while women have slightly different priorities.

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.

Flickr Image By lanuiop

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