Show HN: GiftsBuffer.com

[giftsbuffer]

If you know a person only online and not in real life and find that you would like to send a gift to that person, how would you do it. The other person woud not be comfortable giving out his or her home address, telephone no. or a real name.

I was stuck in such a situation once, which gave me the idea to come up with http://giftsbuffer.com.

GiftsBuffer is a way to send and receive gifts while maintaining your privacy. No need to exchange private details like address, telephone no. or even your real name with real life strangers, to send or receive gifts. GiftsBuffer as the name says, acts as a buffer between the two parties.

This service is powered by Amazon.com amazing service, so you can gift from among thousands of products that Amazon.com sells.

How it works is that if you want to send a gift to someone, select the gift you want to send and enter the e-mail address or registered username of the person you want to send the gift to. The other person adds his or her home address, telephone no. and real name to the gift. We gather and update the shipping charges and tax information for the gift. You make payment for the gift based on the updated info. After we receive payment confirmation, we place the order for the gift items with Amazon.com. Amazon delivers the gifts to the person you wished to send the gifts to.

Neither party will ever know the address, telephone no. or real name of each other ever, thereby enabling a safe way to send and receive gifts online.

I am posting this here with hope that the good people at Hacker News would give me their valuable feedback, a little bit of encouragement and lots of constructive criticism. Your thougths on what you think about the idea, the implementation, the design etc would be really invaluable.

Looking forward to your opinions ...

[caw]

I'm a member of a computer forum, and the forum members there sometimes send each other stuff as either random acts of kindness or as thank-you's. But because of the group being in to high end gaming computers, everyone has Steam, and so most of the gifts end up being Steam gifts of games (sometimes things are physically mailed, but those are more spare parts exchanges; the seller doesn't buy anything for that except shipping)

I don't think anyone there would rather go through the hassle of setting up another account on this website so that someone could send a gift from Amazon. There's lots of PC games out there, so it's not like the pool of available items are lame.

[giftsbuffer]

Yes there is the hassle of creating accounts with giftsbuffer.com and Amazon.com, but considering that you can continue to maintain your anonymity, seems like a minor inconvenience.

Steam is an excellent service, but does Steam work for console(XBox. PS3) gaming as well?

[caw]

Steam is an excellent service, but does Steam work for console(XBox. PS3) gaming as well?

No it doesn't, and I suspect this question was largely rhetorical. My point stands that my particular experience doesn't care about your product. There are 3 feelings you can get from a product/service: love, hate, indifference, and the last one is the worst because they won't tell you how to make it better.

However, that doesn't mean my comment was entirely worthless. You could go to a console gaming forum, taking the assumption that people on gaming forums gift each other items, and see if they like or hate your product.

seems like a minor inconvenience Perhaps it's not to me, as a potential customer. Don't fall into a trap of making assumptions for your customer base.

Also, how is this different than an Amazon wish list? Someone else mentioned blog posts, and some bloggers have Amazon wish lists available that they can buy things off of.

[giftsbuffer]

First of all thank you for your comment. It would really be highly arrogant of me to consider any comment as worthless. At this stage of the service, any comment is something to take a lesson from and try to improve the product.

Secondly, I knew from the beginning that service may not be of much use for gifting PC Games because Steam does a such a superb job of it, but there is always scope if someone wants to gift someone a physical copy of a game, be it for Consoles or PC. Anyways, I am sure that not all PC Gamers have a Steam account.

As for creating a new account to gift someone something, I have taken your comment under consideration and am trying to incorporate Facebook login, so that we can at least try to lessen the effort needed to send someone a gift.

We differ to Amazon Wish List in the sense that with our service a person can choose a gift from among thousands of products Amazon offers, and not be restricted to a few items a person chooses to add to his wish list. Also another difference is that, with GiftsBuffer the person receiving the gift will not know who has sent the gift either. If someone chooses to pay via CC on Amazon, the senders personal details including name and billing address, will be clearly communicated to the recipient, at least that is my understanding.

[giftsbuffer]

Clickable: http://giftsbuffer.com

[traxtech]

Who send gifts to an unknown person ???

[giftsbuffer]

It's true that no one would send a gift to an unknown person, but perhaps you would like to send a gift to someone you know only online, for e.g. someone might have helped you out on an online forum or someone's blog post might have helped you out or you might have met someone online in a chat room perhaps etc.

[dannytatom]

Participants of secret santas, probably.

[caw]

This is true. Patio11 has Halloween Bingo Card Creator, so why not "SecretSanta" themed gift buffer? Nothing says that the recipients of the gifts can't know each other offline, but the gift giving process is what needs to be anonymous.