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by jasonkester 5188 days ago
Two things this needs before it's the thing I'd want to use:

- Let me pick a specific gift. I don't want to give a $35 gift card. I want to give a remote control helicopter. Let me pick it out from Amazon and send it to somebody via email.

- Don't require Facebook. I want to send helicopters to everybody on my team the day we ship. I know their email addresses and that should be enough (it's enough to be able to send them money via paypal, so why not gifts through your thing?) I'm not going to friend them on Facebook[1], so at the moment there's no way to send them anything.

Fix that and you've got me. I've been looking for exactly this all week, so if you could do the things above I'd spend $500 through your site today.

[1] The important point here is that the people who you friend on Facebook are a different (though possibly overlapping) set of people from the people you give gifts too. I'm not going to add my Mother as a Facebook friend, but I'll send her gifts on her birthday.

Yes, there do exist people who add everybody they've ever met as friends on Facebook. But there are also people who don't. If you make it impossible for those people to send gifts through your thing, you're losing business.

2 comments

Hey Jason,

This is Charlie from the GiftDish team. I'm locked out of comments from the GiftDish account.

Thanks for the feedback.

1) We're currently evaluating product gifting. Currently, all gifts are "instant" and we're worried about the complexities around shipping/returns/etc that come with products. It's a great use case and we're trying to figure out the best way to do it.

2) We currently working to enable other sign-in options besides Facebook. As stated below, without automatic events, the site is very empty. Additionally, we're soon going to allow invites via email, so you can send gifts and collaborate with non facebook friends.

Why are we inviting people? Why are we collaborating? Isn't the "Sending Gifts" the main thing your site does? The mechanism you use to login should not affect that in any way.

Further, why is the site based on Events? I tried to send a gift to test it out, but there's no "Send a Gift" button. Why is that not a big giant element at the top of the page, sitting next to a box where I can type an email address?

Instead, I need to find the "add an event" button in the nav, then jump through a bunch of steps to create a new event with a date and find the one option in the list of event types that lets me actually send a gift without entering more information. Seems like a lot of unnecessary complexity that detracts from the central focus of the site.

That said, it's quite pretty. And the workflow to send birthday gifts to my facebook friends is pretty cool. You just need a way to send gifts to people who aren't in my Facebook list and/or aren't having a birthday.

I agree with OP. This is a complete non-starter for me if I can't actually send physical gifts. I actually just assumed that you were an amazon affiliate play:)
I agree on your first point, however I find your second comment an issue, with Facebook your friends personal details are already entered. With Paypal, you send money to people who already have an account, Well that is my understanding of this. But again the data is already inputted. Since this is such a new website building up a user base from sign up would require you to invite all your friends to register so they have the details neeed in the system to send such a gift. Correct me if I am wrong.
With PayPal you can send money to any email address. If that address isn't associated with a PayPal account an email is sent telling the recipient to sign up to PayPal and claim their money. [1]

I don't see why giftdish couldn't work the same way: you send your gift to an email address and the recipient then has to open account to claim their gift if they don't have one already. Having a gift waiting would be a pretty strong incentive to open a new account.

[1] - https://www.paypal.com/webapps/helpcenter/article/?articleID...

Davweb,

That's our plan, and it works in much the same way within Facebook, now we just need to get it implemented.