Was the season to be merry etc…Xmas sales strong

We witnessed explosive sales of virtual gifts over the Christmas period, selling over 28,000 gifts in the five days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve, averaging out to selling around 233 gifts per hour. In the run up towards Christmas Day, Flirtomatic sold over 54,000 virtual gifts, with Snowwomen outselling Snowmen by almost 2-1.

From the corresponding data, it seems many Flirtomatic users tackled their post Christmas day boredom and continued the generous spirit, by logging in and hitting the FlirtShop. Gift purchases on Boxing Day were double what they were on Christmas Day and rose a further 50% on 27^th December.

One of the most popular gifts over Christmas was the Flirtomatic Christmas Stocking, which was also one of the most expensive, selling over 16,000 and a third of those were bought within the first three days of the item being on sale. Some of the other top-selling gifts over Christmas included Candy Canes (just under 9,000), Mistletoe (around 8,300) and Rednose Reindeer (over 7,000).

Vodafone UK’s promotion offering PAYG users free data between Christmas and New Year’s, also seemed to help get people into the spirit of things, giving people the chance to really explore what their phone can do using the web, without fear of huge data charges. The promotion also resulted in an average of 6x increase in new Flirtomatic user sign up across the week.

Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic commented: “There’s no doubt that when done correctly, virtual gifts have helped encourage more people to make micro payments using their mobile and by doing so, has built up their confidence in using their phone to pay for things. After selling over a million gifts in 2009, we know that our users love giving gifts to each other, but gifts are just one of our premium service revenue streams and naturally we see a spike in other streams over the holiday period too. Our ‘New Year, New You’ service is currently very popular, giving users the chance to pay to delete all their lowest ratings, so they can start the year off with a perfect 10”.

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, Flirtomatic is already stocking its virtual shelves of Valentine’s gifts and services, including a Valentine’s Gift Box, lots of Valentine’s inspired gifts and a Secret Valentines service, which will allow Flirtomatic users to send gifts to people outside of Flirtomatic.