With Valentine's Day quickly approaching, men everywhere are scrambling to find that perfect gift for their sweetheart. While most of us wait until the last minute to pick out that special something to show our gratitude towards our significant other, many web vendors begin preparing for Feb. 14 weeks in advance. Ecommerce Guide spoke with three vendors this week as they geared up for one of the busiest holidays of the year.

Vermont Teddy Bear

Tom Funk, Web Manager for the Vermont Teddy Bear Company, said Valentine's Day is the company's biggest single holiday, accounting for almost 26% of its entire year's orders, with Mother's Day and Christmas accounting for about 19% and 14% respectively. Those sales include not just Vermont Teddy Bears, but also flowers under its Calyx & Corolla brand, women's pajamas under the PajamaGram Company brand, and gourmet food gifts under the TastyGram brand.

"Our Valentine's Day traffic begins in late January and early February as existing customers start receiving our mail-order catalogs," said Funk. "In February, we send millions more direct-mail catalogs, roll out national radio advertising, which peaks at about 700 radio stations nationwide, and national television ads as well. Our web traffic and orders start to take off in a hockey-stick pattern during the second week of February."

Funk said at the peak times during Valentine's week, the company receives about 2,000 online orders in an hour.

"Very roughly, each website gets over 200,000 visitors a day, and processes over 10,000 orders a day. By contrast, on a sleepy day in midsummer, when there are no major gift-giving holidays, we process just a few hundred orders all day," he said.

When asked how his company handles the surge in holiday orders, Funk said Vermont Teddy Bear and its sister sites rely on Yahoo to make sure everything is up and running.

"The engineers at Yahoo Merchant Solutions, which handles the bulk of our holiday traffic, have years of experience handling our capacity needs. They make sure we are allocated all the servers and bandwidth we need, and they pay special attention to the order-generation servers, which receive the orders and transmit them down to our inventory and fulfillment system," he said.

"Our web team also builds several special order-entry websites for all the temporary phone agents at call centers across the country. We maintain an extranet so our media buyers can place their buys and interact securely with their radio station reps. We maintain other extranets to communicate with the specialty flower growers who supply Calyx & Corolla and the lobstermen and bakers and so on who supply the TastyGram gourmet food site," added Funk.

The Vermont Teddy Bear Company web site takes in approximately 2,000 orders per hour during peak times leading up to Valentine's Day.

While Vermont Teddy Bears has become an established brand, the company's PajamaGram business is one of its fastest-growing lines. Launched in 2002, Funk said by fiscal 2004 it was about a $7 million business.

"We stock an average of five sizes of couple hundred different styles of pajamas, robes, slippers and other sleepwear, so the PajamaGram.com website queries a real-time database of available sizes and is constantly shutting off product as the season picks up. Since most of our Valentine's Day customers are men buying for women, we promote online gift certificates for the guy who doesn't know his wife or girlfriend's size - or her taste in clothes," he said.

So how does Vermont Teddy Bear Company deal with the flood of orders to ensure on-time delivery and happy customers on Valentine's Day?

"The most obvious preparations around here are operational: FedEx and UPS line up a parade of empty tractor-trailers outside our warehouse to be loaded with our packages, many of which are held to arrive exactly on February 14," said Funk. "We more than double the size of our staff, with seasonal hires to take telephone orders, staff an online customer-service chat with our web customers, dress and pack teddy bears. We keep up a pretty furious pace, with most of us working several 18-hour days in a row, and helping out in whatever department needs extra help. Even personalized bears go out the same day, so if someone visits the website and orders a hockey player or a nurse or a 'Mom and Cubs' with their loved one's name on the bears' outfits, they are personalized using high-speed embroidery machines and shipped out the same day."

"This year, since Valentine's Day falls on a Monday, we made special arrangements with our shippers to pick up packages late into Saturday evening, so we'll be taking orders online right up until 4 p.m. Eastern on Saturday for guaranteed Valentine's Day delivery — a full 24 hours later than most of our competition," added Funk.

Perfume Bay

Cute teddy bears and comfy pajamas aren't the only things popular on Valentine's Day. Perfume, cologne, beauty and hygiene products and fragrant gift baskets are also a great way to go.

Jaqueline Tran, owner of Perfume Bay, said the Valentine's rush on her site begins the week before the holiday of hearts.

Perfume Bay displays a variety of Valentine's Day gift ideas on its home page.

"We prepare for the Valentine's Day holiday rush by updating our website to promote gift idea products. Most experienced online shoppers will tend to order a week ahead to make the standard shipping cutoff. We also offer expedited shipping to accommodate for last minute shoppers," she said.

In order to prepare for the holiday, Tran said she increases her staff and everyone works extended hours, "to ensure that orders are shipped in time for Valentine's Day."

Product promotion is also key during this time of year, said Tran.

"We'll do some online keyword advertising with major search engines. We also send out an email campaign to our customers to notify them of specials that we are promoting," she said.

An example of how Perfume Bay utilizes its home page to drive sales, links to gift ideas under $25, $50 and $100 are displayed prominently.

"Our website increases a lot during the major holidays. This year, our website received 50% more traffic than last year around this time. The best selling items (this year) are the name brand fragrances from Gucci, Burberry, Dolce & Gabbana and Prada. We also feature a many beautiful fragrance gift sets, which are very popular for gift-giving," said Tran.

Harbor Sweets

What would Valentine's Day be without mouth-watering chocolate treats? We're not sure, and we don't want to find out.

Phyllis B. LeBlanc, owner and C.E.O. of Harbor Sweets in Salem, MA., said her company has plenty of palate pleasing options.

"It's certainly a busy season for us. One of the reasons it's more hectic is because it's more of a last minute holiday. It's particularly difficult as a mail order company to deal with that. We always send out emails to customers prior to a holiday to remind them to look online and place their orders. It's our 'public service,'" she said laughing.

Looking for last minute treats on Valentine's Day? Harbor Sweets lists retail partners around the country onits web site.

Founded 36 years ago, Harbor Sweets set up its online shop six or seven years ago, according to LeBlanc.

"It seemed to be the appropriate thing to do. More so in terms of offering our customers another way to order because people were getting more involved in ordering over the Internet. Wanted to stay abreast of the times," she said.

Valentine's Day, surprisingly, is not the busiest time of year for Harbor Sweets.

"We do a lot of corporate gifts around the holiday season, whereas people send only one gift for Valentine's Day. We build inventory in preparation for Valentine's Day and hopefully have a good supply," said LeBlanc.

Even so, Harbor Sweets has already sold out of many of its products this week. But that doesn't mean Valentine procrastinators are out of luck.

"We also list retail stores on our site that carry our chocolates, so if you're going online on Valentine's Day you can find a store near you. We have more than 1,000 partners, but we only list 'five-star' shops that carry the largest selection and meet certain criteria. It's a more limited group," said LeBlanc.

As part of Harbor Sweets' Valentine's Day promotion, LeBlanc said the company is offering additional incentive to customers to purchase certain items through its web site this year.

"Right now, since Feb. 1, we've been donating 5% of anything with a heart on it to the Red Cross for the tsunami relief fund. We've had a very good response to that. We'll know after Valentine's Day how much we'll be contributing," she said.

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