Faster shipping or lower prices? Gender difference in online shipping

Customers prefer not only lower product prices but also faster product delivery when shopping online. Using transaction-level data provided by JD.com, we estimate customer preferences in regards to product price and promised delivery time based on the discrete choice framework. We find indeed that promised delivery time, as well as product price, has a significant impact on customers' purchasing choice, despite the fact that most orders from the data set were delivered within two days. In addition, we find that female customers are more sensitive to product price while male customers are more sensitive to delivery time. The gender difference in the delivery time preference continues to exist even after we control for shoppers' purchase power and shopping behavior. The average willingness-to-pay (WTP) for one-day-faster shipping is less than 7 (Chinese) Yuan for female customers but close to 11 Yuan for male customers, or 63% more to be extra. These results indicate a commonly missed opportunity for online retailers who should be considering more personalized delivery strategies based on customers' genders. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first empirical work that estimates online shoppers' WTP for promised delivery time from individual level data