Is 'Facebook Gifts' the Next Big Thing in Gifting? Startup Giveter is Trying to Trump it

Monday October 08, 2012 , 2 min Read

Facebook recently launched 'Facebook Gifts' which was a clear outshoot from its Karma acquisition. An alarming sign for all ecommerce players, Facebook Gifts is solving a very relevant 'gifting problem'. Giveter, a startup founded by Avinash Saxena is also a solution to gifting and now has come up with a unique model.

Explaining the trend, Avinash says, "Last year US witnessed a strong social gifting wave. Social gifting saw two main phases, the first was gifting coupons on Facebook by websites like Wrapp, the second was enabling gifting of real products on Facebook - what Karma did and got acquired by Facebook, which led to recent launch of Facebook Gifts" and to build on this, Giveter is trying to bring a new wave.

What is it? It'll give you recommendations basis what the recipient has 'liked' on Facebook. "Ingenious!" you'd say? The bigger question is of traction. "We have come up with a unique model that is a mix of gifts curation and gifting on social platforms. With an open model we have access to wide variety of real products, unlike any of the social gifting websites in the US. And we are soon going to enable gifting on social platforms. If we get it right - we will become the first social gifting website for wide variety of relevant and real products," explains Avinash.

'In Content' Browsing Design

It might seem like a buzz word but this has significantly increased the pageviews for Giveter, informs Avinash. He goes on to explain, "The user sub-consciously navigates towards a more specific set of gifts suited to his/her needs, which provides us with more relevant information to give better suggestions. For example, if some body reaches to our gifts for girlfriend page, since we already know the relationship, we categorize gifts under different age buckets. Once the has chosen an age, we filter results and present them under personality bucket, and similarly further. We have experienced an increase in pageviews and conversations doing so, and still our page is clutter free."