Life-stage and intra-urban heterogeneity in women's online shopping patterns: Segment-level evidence from a tier-two Indian city

Research on women’s digital consumption in India has largely proceeded on the assumption that “women shop-pers” constitute a coherent market. This paper questions that assumption. Drawing on survey responses from 385 womenin Visakhapatnam, a rapidly digitising tier-two city on India’s eastern seaboard, we examine whether purchase engagement,category repertoire and platform preference vary systematically by life stage and by location within a single urban area. Threelife-stage segments were compared: students, working women and homemakers. Engagement differed sharply across them,F(2, 382) = 44.46, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.189, with a monotonic gradient from students (M = 4.12) through working women(M = 3.78) to homemakers (M = 3.34); the students–homemakers contrast was large by conventional standards (d = 1.28).Segment composition also varied across the city’s four zones, χ2(6) = 12.79, p = 0.047, Cramér’s V = 0.129, with home-makers markedly over-represented in the peripheral western zone and working women concentrated in the northern residentialcorridor. At city level, purchasing was routine rather than occasional (77.1% shopping at least two to four times monthly),category demand was led by fashion (29.1%) and groceries (22.1%), and platform preference was highly concentrated (top-twoshare 59.0%, HHI = 0.205). Taken together, the results indicate that aggregate portraits of the “Indian woman online shopper”conceal more than they reveal, and that meaningful segmentation in tier-two markets operates at a sub-city spatial scale thatnational survey designs cannot detect.