Valentine's Day planners and procrastinators purchase online at work

Results of a new study about online buying behaviour in the run up to Valentine’s Day has been released.

by Helen Leggatt

The survey of a quarter of a million online consumers, by Oneupweb, took place between the first day of February through to the 12, February. Data collected was traffic figures on variety of websites, selling Valentine’s Day items such as flowers, jewellery and other gifts.

It turns out that Tuesday, February 6, was the peak day for Valentine’s Day sales, with most consumers using their work connections to make the purchases. Whether this is due to faster connections or privacy reasons is not clear, but similar results came out of 2006 holiday season shopping surveys. Perhaps surfers are hitting the shops at the weekends and keeping their online research for during the week.

The highest day in terms of online traffic to the Valentine’s Day sales sites was Monday, February 12 and purchasers on these days were usually subject to overnight delivery charges.

Pre-planning, research, procrastination or forgetfulness, whichever it is, websites need to be optimized and ready to go from the earliest to the latest moment, especially where search marketing is concerned.

“Make sure that your bid strategies follow the peaks - you don't want to be paying for keywords when you can't ship the item in time,” advises Lisa Wehr, president of Oneupweb. “Additionally, you don't want to miss out on sales on February 6 by being at the bottom of the list.”