Like Santa, Cupid a force to be reckoned with by e-retailers

Valentine’s Day online shopping doesn’t get anywhere near the attention from researchers and media as the Nov. 1-Dec. 24 holiday shopping season. It’s a shopping period, though, that should not be slighted: Feb. 1-Feb. 14 is like a mini-Christmas shopping season, an especially sweet one for online flowers, candy, jewelry, gifts and cards merchants, says Lisa Wehr, president of search engine marketing firm Oneupweb.

This year Valentine’s Day e-commerce site traffic peaked Feb. 12, conversion rates Feb. 5 and online sales volume Feb. 6, according to “Searching for Love: Valentine’s Day Online Retail Buying Trends,” a Oneupweb study. The study is based on data reported by 12 of the company’s numerous retailer clients. The 12 companies are large Internet-only merchants or combined catalog and Internet merchants. Oneupweb restricted the study to retailers of Valentine’s Day-oriented products that offered shoppers special holiday-themed promotions online. The aggregate data includes traffic, conversion and sales figures from nearly 300,000 unique e-commerce site visitors.

The unusual disparity among the three metrics—especially sales peaking Feb. 6, six days before traffic’s zenith on Feb. 12, then plummeting four days before traffic topped off—stems from procrastinating or forgetful shoppers’ worries about on-time delivery, Wehr says. “Valentine’s Day shoppers seem to do a lot of research before converting; conversion peaked only one day before sales did,” she says, noting that traffic’s second highest day was Feb. 5, the highest day for conversion. “But many shoppers hadn’t made a holiday purchase come Feb. 7, and when shopping online after the 7th they feared they could not get gifts shipped on time.”

The study also shows Cupid is not striking well on weekends: Weekend dips in traffic, conversion rates and sales likely are caused by greater broadband adoption at work vs. home, consumers wanting to keep purchases secret from sweethearts, and increased bricks-and-mortar store shopping on Saturdays and Sundays, the study says.

Though research firms with a large focus on web retailing have yet to release any final sales numbers for Feb. 1-Feb.14—most told Internet Retailer they don’t even track Valentine’s Day web sales—consumers planned on dropping some significant coin, according to the National Retail Federation’s 2007 Valentine’s Day Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch LLC. The average consumer will spend $119.67 for Valentine’s Day, up from $100.89 last year; with 63.4% of consumers planning to celebrate the holiday, total 2007 Valentine’s Day spending in all sales channels is expected to reach $16.9 billion, predicts the survey of 7,703 consumers. The survey does not break out numbers by channel.

ComScore Networks Inc., though, has broken out some figures. The research firm that specializes in consumer behavior reports consumers last week spent: $24.5 million online on flowers and greeting cards, compared with the $12.4 million average of the preceding four weeks; and $24.7 million on jewelry, compared with the $20.3 million average of the preceding four weeks.

Contrary to those numbers and the BIGresearch data, small business owners may not have been looking at holiday sales through consumers` rose-colored glasses: only 37% of small business owners anticipated strong multi-channel dollars for Valentine’s Day 2007, a considerable drop from 55% in 2006, according to the Annual Small Business Valentine’s Day Outlook survey from Constant Contact Inc., an e-mail marketing services firm. “The good news is U.S. small business owners anticipated more online sales this Valentine’s Day,” says CEO Gail Goodman.

The survey of 1,000 small business owner customers of Constant Contact notes 64% of respondents believe consumers would be making more purchases online for Valentine’s Day this year. The survey also shows 53% of respondents offered multi-channel Valentine’s Day promotions, with 66% marketing the promotions and their brand via e-mail and 32% online.