Valentine's Day 2025 was forecasted to see record spending of $27.5 billion, surpassing 2024's $25.8 billion and slightly exceeding the previous record of $27.4 billion set in 2020. The average consumer spent $188.81, up from $185.81 the previous year. Participation increased to 56% of consumers, with men's involvement rising from 51% to 55%.

Spending on significant others reached $14.6 billion, while family gifts matched the 2020 record at $4.3 billion. Purchases for friends (32%) and co-workers (19%) hit all-time highs.

Online shopping led to 38%, followed by department stores (34%) and discount stores (29%). The trends highlighted stronger social connections and the continued rise of digital shopping.

Our WebSitePulse 2025 Valentine's Day Online Retail Performance and Uptime Report is completed. For the 18th year in a row, we monitored six leading gift-shopping websites during the St. Valentine's Day fever.

For this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of websites' home pages and a complete web transaction, such as an end-user interacting with the website.

The report measures both the websites' Uptime and Response Time and the multi-step online transactions, which were made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 3 different monitoring locations: Washington, DC (US East Coast), San Francisco, CA (US West Coast), and Chicago, IL (US Central).

The overall speed of the monitored online retailers' websites was quite good during the whole monitored period. We found that all monitored websites' average daily response time was 2.929 sec. which is 0.058 sec slower than last year's. The daily average responses by location are as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 2.524 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 3.496 sec
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 2.771 sec

This year's speed leader is farmgirlflowers.com, with an average response time of 1.652 seconds, followed by brookstone.com (2.122 sec) and harryanddavid.com (2.471 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was vermonteddybear.com, with a 4.153 average response time, which undoubtedly frustrated many visitors and led to a revenue loss.

The overall uptime of the monitored online retailers' websites was nearly uninterrupted during the monitored period, except for minor fluctuations on February 14th.

The daily average uptime for the six websites for 2025 St. Valentine's Day was 99.40%. The daily average uptime by location is as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.39%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.40%
• Chicago, IL (US Central) – 99.41%

This year, just harryanddavid.com and brookstone.com were 100% online for the monitored period. Helzberg.com was almost without interruptions, with 99.99% uptime. Vermonteddybear.com, again, had the highest downtime — 97.768% — meaning it was down for about 8 hours during the monitoring period.

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. resp. time
1	farmgirlflowers.com	2.747	1.269	0.939	1.652
2	brookstone.com	2.299	2.087	1.980	2.122
3	harryanddavid.com	3.129	2.297	1.987	2.471
4	gourmetgiftbaskets.com	4.041	2.850	2.564	3.152
5	helzberg.com	4.359	3.948	3.769	4.025
6	vermonteddybear.com	4.400	4.178	3.882	4.153

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Chicago	Washington	Avg. uptime
1	harryanddavid.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	brookstone.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	helzberg.com	99.984%	100.000%	99.985%	99.990%
4	gourmetgiftbaskets.com	100.000%	99.983%	99.985%	99.989%
5	farmgirlflowers.com	98.643%	98.696%	98.643%	98.661%
6	vermonteddybear.com	97.791%	97.762%	97.750%	97.768%