FB about to revolutionize gift-giving

[vanillacourage]

Don't know how I feel about this...but I do love the bolded part.

www.slate.com/articles/technology/holidays/2012/12/facebook_gifts_how_the_social_network_has_revolutionized_gift_giving_on.single.html#pagebreak_anchor_2

Excerpts:

Earlier this year, though, a startup called Karma launched a mobile app that I considered a breakthrough for gifting. The app alerted you to your friends’ special occasions, recommended gifts they might like, took care of all the pesky gifting logistics, and, best of all, gave the giftee a sense of joy even before the thing arrived. Karma did a lot of this by plugging into the world’s most-comprehensive repository of social relationships—Facebook. It wasn’t much of a surprise, then, when Facebook announced that it had acquired the small firm last spring....



If you have access to Gifts, you’ll see small links for it all over Facebook—for instance, under announcements of your friend’s birthday, you can click, “Give him a gift.” You can also just go to anyone’s page and click the gift button. Do that and you’ll see a pop-up menu of potential presents for your giftee. Facebook has signed up more than 200 large and small merchants to source its gifts. They range from the generic (Starbucks and iTunes gift cards) to the helpful (a ride in an Uber cab) to the artisanal (my wife bought me Grady’s Cold Brew iced-coffee concentrate, made by a small Brooklyn firm) to the quirky (a kitchen apron you can doodle on). Gifts range from $5 all the way to hundreds, not including shipping and tax. The service recommends a handful of gifts that your recipient might like, but it also lets you choose anything from its catalog. Choose something, pick a digital greeting card to go along with your gift, and then add a nice note. If you’ve never given a gift on Facebook before, you’ve got to enter your payment details, too. You can also decide whether or not you’d like your gift to be announced on your recipient’s Facebook Timeline. Then press send.

Now your friend immediately gets a notice that she’s received a gift. She clicks or taps on it, gets your snazzy digital greeting card, and then sees what you bought her. The item itself usually arrives in three to five days.

...

Here’s something else that’s magical about Facebook Gifts. Say your recipient doesn’t like your gift. You bought her a box of chocolates, and she’s allergic. Or maybe you purchased a jumper for her baby, but you chose the wrong size. Facebook Gifts allows her to adjust your gift to her preferences, and you remain none the wiser—she can choose the right size, a more appropriate color, or even swap your gift for something else entirely. Facebook shows her a menu of other gifts that are similarly priced, and she can pick anything she likes. And, finally, she’s the one who enters the address she’d like the gift shipped to. You, as the sender, don’t need to call your mom to ask for your Aunt Bertha’s ZIP code.

[takeonyou]

Awe.some.

[simpsongal]

I'm still skeptical about FB's ability to monetize their site. I think an incidental gift-giving component could work. But if it becomes a primary driver for the website, a lot of people will be turned off.

[Deleted]

I like this!