Valentine's Day — like other gift-giving holidays — is quickly becoming a cash juggernaut online. This week, PayPal released new Valentine's Day online shopping trend data, gathered from February 1-13, 2006. The survey shows purchases for Valentine's Day increased 23 percent from 2005. Of the retail categories studied, candy and jewelry netted the most sales by online shoppers.

Interactive marketing and research firm Questus released a similar study earlier in the week, showing two out of three respondents would buy more & and a greater variety of & gifts for their special someone this Valentine's Day due to online shopping. Questus also said flowers were the most purchased Valentine's Day gift online.

Verisign's latest online payment statistics are based on sales volume processed through its VeriSign Payment Services, now a PayPal business.

Findings of the study include:

• Overall online spending for Valentine's Day increased 23 percent over the same period in 2005.
• Online spending on candy increased 140 percent in 2006 as compared to 2005.
• Online spending on jewelry increased 42 percent in 2006 over the same time in 2005.
• The most popular retail categories studied were candy at 30 percent, jewelry with 30 percent and flowers at 25 percent. Gifts (balloons, baskets, etc.) and greeting cards made up the remainder of online sales, with 13 percent and 1 percent of online sales respectively.

ECommerce Guide was unable to obtain the full report from PayPal.

Devin Comiskey is the Managing Editor of ECommerce-Guide.com.

Do you have a comment or question about this article or other e-commerce topics in general? Speak out in the SmallBusinessComputing.com E-Commerce Forum. Join the discussion today!