Consumer Psychology and Behavior of Women of Different Ages in Online Clothing Consumption

Abstract

By analyzing the customer's product evaluation (n=1,173) of women's clothing orders on an online shopping platform, this paper studies the preferences of women of different age groups (younger group aged 20-40 years and elder group aged 60-80 years) for different types of clothing purchasing behaviors. The hypothesis considered in our study is for younger group, they are more inclined to buy fashionable and good-looking clothes. For the elderly, they pay more attention to the comfort when measuring a piece of clothing. We test this hypothesis at two levels: We conduct a textual analysis of 1,173 data from LIWC's custom dictionary on the two most obvious characteristics of clothes, the appearance and comfort of clothes. And conduct custom dictionary analysis on the dressing scenes of different groups. Our results show that age is negatively related to the emphasis placed on clothing choices, with the older group placing even more importance on the appearance of clothing than the younger group. It could also be explained that the older group would choose clothes that look prettier rather than those that are comfortable to wear, since they would be involved in more special occasions instead of comfortable clothing for casual scenes. This paper will also discuss the relationship between the purchasing behavior of women of different ages and consumer psychology, aiming to find the change of the consumption pattern of women of specific age groups on the online shopping platform. The study provides meaningful insights on e-commerce, consumer behavior, fashion industry.