Gifts Project : Social ecommerce Platform for Group Gifts

The Gifts Project is a social ecommerce platform for Group Gifts that helps online retailers to leverage their shoppers’ social buying experience. With Group Gifting, friends can share their special occasions with their social graph by actively participating in buying a Group Gift on any retailer's website. Maya Gura, Cofounder The Gifts Project talks to YourStory about this social gifting platform.How did Gifts project come about?

The idea of The Gifts Project was formed when a good friend just moved to California and he had a birthday coming up. On his birthday he received many (106) warm greetings on Facebook wall and lovely virtual gifts (12), but not a single meaningful desirable gift.

We are four partners and friends for many years, and we decided to change this situation by chipping in together and send him a BIG memorable Group Gift. Unfortunately, it wasn’t easy. Who picks the gift? Who shops? Whose credit card? How do we collect the money? Should we split it equally? How do we ship the gift?

This triggered us to make Group Gifting easy and affordable by removing the awkwardness from selecting the perfect gift and collecting money for it, even when the people are remote. That’s what we do

Group gifting ?

Group Gifting enables customers to share their special occasions with friends by actively participating in buying a Group Gift together on their favorite retailer's website. The way Group Gifting works is a simple and ingenious process that includes four main parts:Start a Group Gift

During this step, the gift organizer selects the lucky recipient and a special occasion. She picks the perfect gift and decides how much she wants to collect from friends. Next, she invites the gift-giving participants through social networks or email invitations to join together and make this gift affordable for everyone.

Friends chip in

Fellow gift-givers can contribute money with a credit / debit card or via their PayPal account. The money each person contributes is confidential to all but the Group Gift organizer. Chippers can also invite more friends to participate in the Group Gift or start a new gift for someone they care about.

Track performance

The organizer has few options to manage the Group Gift: she can purchase the gift and get reimbursed later; she can cancel or change the gift and invite more friends to participate. She is the only one who can view the contributions and send reminders to the invitees.

Give the gift

When the Group Gift is fully funded, the organizer can purchase it with the collected money. The lucky recipient will get the gift straight to his doorsteps with a personalized greeting sent to his email from all the participants.

How can people use Gifts project ?

Friends can chip in for each others gifts while they shop on their favorite retailer's website.

What was the idea behind this ?

We help online retailers, marketplaces and gift stores to leverage their shoppers’ social buying experience. For our customers, this is an opportunity to tap into their shoppers’ social graph, and is a proven way to uplift their ticket price, bring new users to the site and grow the average revenue per user.

Your business model

Affiliateship fees. Since we help the retailer to sell more pricey goodies, and bring more users to their site, they share with us the revenues from the gifts.

Growth plans

We are currently working on our new product: Social Plugin. The Plug-in overlay sits comfortably on any product page of an ecommerce site to enable users make a Group Gift out of any selling item. You can read more about it on: http://www.giftsproject.com/products/plugin

Check out Gifts Project here : http://www.giftsproject.com/