A survey by translation agency One Hour Translation has revealed that 31% of people who plan to buy a Valentine’s Day gift this year intend to so online.

The survey, conducted in collaboration with Google Consumer Surveys included 4,020 participants in the USA, Canada, Mexico, Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Holland, Brazil, Japan and Australia.

One Hour Translation asked the participants: “Do you intend to buy a Valentine’s Day gift this year?”

In the 11 countries participating in the survey, a global average of 20%  answered that they plan to buy presents in physical stores, and 9% answered they plan to buy presents online which equals to 30% of expected shoppers.

Approximately 63% said they were not intending to buy Valentine’s Day gifts this year. The remaining portion of 8% of those surveyed chose the option ‘No gifts this year / none of the options above‘.

The agency said it believes it is possible that most of these people do not recognise Valentine’s Day or are not currently involved in a relationship.

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The countries with leading number of respondents who prefer to buy gifts in physical stores are Japan (35%), Italy (33%), Holland (30%) and Mexico (29%), German respondents were the least likely to purchase gifts from brick-and-mortar store at 7%.

The survey found that Italian shoppers were most likely to purchase gifts online (23%) followed by Holland (16%) and United States and Canada (10% each).  Brazilians were least likely to purchase gifts online at 3%.

Two-thirds of those questioned revealed information concerning their gender – 53% male and 47% female. The survey showed that 12% of men answered that they intended to buy a Valentine’s Day gift this year over the internet, 20% said they would buy a gift in a physical store and 61% said they were not intending to buy a gift this year.

Of the women surveyed, 8% intended to buy a Valentine’s Day gift this year online, 21% chose physical store and 65% said they weren’t buying a gift this year.

Of the 3,200 people surveyed who supplied their age group, there was not much variation in the proportion of people intending to buy a present in a physical store. The age group with the lowest percentage of respondents who answered this way was 18-24 year-olds (19%). The highest percentage of respondents in this category came from the age group 45-54 (22%).

Regarding online purchases, the lowest rate of respondents (8.9%) came from 18-24 year-olds, while the highest rate (12%) was among 35-44 year-olds. The survey also found that the lowest rate of respondents who did not intend to purchase a gift came from 25-34 year-olds (60%) while the highest (66%) came from 65+ age group.

Yaron Kaufman, CMO of One Hour Translation, said: “The survey measuring the intention of consumers who plan to purchase Valentine’s Day gifts is our first survey for this holiday, but it is one in a series of surveys concerning online purchases that we have been carrying out for the last few years”

He added: “Similar to the other surveys, the new Valentine’s Day survey points to a large number of consumers, 31%, who prefer to buy online. The conclusion is clear – since Valentine’s Day is the most significant shopping day after the November-December holidays and so many people are open to online shopping, we recommend that e-commerce companies expand their digital marketing activity around Valentine’s Day and utilise the geographical, gender and age-group segments that we have presented in this survey.”

One Hour Translation is a translation agency, providing translation services to thousands of global e-commerce companies.  The agency provides an international perspective for consumer preferences around the world concerning the purchase of Valentine’s Day gifts this year.