http://www.coremetrics.com/company/2009/pr09_02_19_valentine_benchmark.php

Reviewing those results, you can see that

Pet Stores reported solid numbers across the board, from a 5.6 percent rise in order sessions to a 6.2 percent rise in the average number of items per order to a 5.4 percent increase in the average dollar value of those orders.

Ok, there were some other positive numbers too. It seems that consumers decided that Valentine’s day was a good reason to keep the New Year’s resolution of getting fit.

Sporting Goods retailers reported similarly strong numbers, with a jump of 10 percent in order sessions. The average number of items per order jumped more than 7.6 percent and the average dollar value of those orders jumped by 4.13 percent.

Even with that small bit of Valentine’s fueled consumer optimism, the rest of February was down year over year and also month over month.  So, after seeing the stock market today, one of the big questions on everyone’s mind of course is whether we’ve finally found a bottom. Have consumers once again opened their wallets and will we see a sustained upward trend? Is February the end of the downward trend for retailers? I suspect the short answer is that it’s extremely (and unfortunately) unlikely. But the long answer is much more interesting, though admittedly more sobering as well. I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction about online retail. It appears we’ve entered a period of extreme volatility in online shopping habits. Think about the stock market – we’d all gotten used to a period of not just growth, but of a stable upward trend. The wild saw tooth patterns of the markets over the last few months have (I think it’s safe to safe to say) left us all feeling uncomfortable and well, a little unstable; one day the Dow is down 300, the next day down 50, and then the third day up 250. Online retail is going to experience something similar as consumers open their wallets for important inflection points – Valentine’s Day, Easter, Summer Break, Back-to-School, for example – only to snap them firmly shut in between. The peaks are going to provide the much-needed breaks from the troughs we’re going to experience, and those troughs are going to be deeper and last longer than the contractions we’ve seen in the past.

So what’s an online retailer to do? How do you get your business to report the same kinds of returns that pet stores and sporting goods retailers reported for Valentine’s Day? I’d offer three tips:

1) Focus efforts on what works in every market condition, i.e. targeted emails and product mixes that match the market trends.  Time and time again consumers prove they will respond to relevant messages and product mixes that match their buying habits

2) Look for opportunities to intelligently use your cross sell and upsell technologies to go after every selling opportunity on and off your site. Is it time to start recommending lower priced substitute products?

3) Really get to know your customers’ buying trends by both benchmarking their behavior constantly against the market and by looking closely at the browsing and shopping trends of your unique customer segments.  Can you use the current market trends (think Financial Technical Analysis) to forecast the best time to ramp up your marketing and promotional activities?