  The days that precede Valentine's Day are characterized by extensive gift
shopping activities all across the globe. In China, where much shopping takes
place online, there has been an explosive growth in e-commerce sales during
Valentine's Day over the recent years. This exploratory study investigates the
extent to which each product category and each shopper group can exhibit
romantic love within China's e-market throughout the 2 weeks leading up to 2019
Valentine's Day. Massive data from Alibaba, the biggest e-commerce retailer
worldwide, are utilized to formulate an innovative romance index (RI) to
quantitatively measure e-romantic values for products and shoppers. On this
basis, millions of shoppers, along with their millions of products purchased
around Valentine's Day, are analyzed as a case study to demonstrate their love
consumption and romantic gift-giving. The results of the analysis are then
illustrated to help understand Chinese e-romance based on the perspectives of
different product categories and shopper groups. This empirical information
visualization also contributes to improving the segmentation, targeting, and
positioning of China's e-market for Valentine's Day.
