Show HN: SwiftGift – Send physical gifts to phone numbers on Christmas Day
swiftgift.me
swiftgift.me
Actually our acceptance rate numbers are well over 85%!
Reasons for such high success: 1. Sender can customise the notification message to their Recipient (calling them by a pet name or naming their anniversary etc). 2. Notification arrives directly from the Sender. Not from centralised number. Even if the Recipient does fear a phishing scheme (indeed this does happen) they will typically ask the sender what's up with their phone sending random messages. At this point the Sender explains... :)
The reputation is basically crowdsourced - the Sender explains everything to their Recipient :)
On the one hand, it's marketed as a tool for sending gifts to your "friends and loved ones." But presumably if you know a friend or family member well enough to want to spend money on a gift for them, you also know them well enough to know or feel comfortable asking for their mailing address.
On the other hand, it's marketed as "Private & Secure: Address is never revealed to sender." In other words, from the recipient's perspective, it's a way to accept gifts from people you DON'T know well, or people you don't trust enough to let them know where you live.
So even though the outward marketing says it's a way to send gifts among friends, I'm not so sure that in practice it's an especially good tool for friend-to-friend gifting.
What it might turn out to be is a good tool for sending gifts to people you don't know well, but want to make a good impression with. I'm thinking sales leads, someone you met at a party and who gave you their number, etc.
Put another way, this service seems best suited for asymmetric relationships, where the gift giver has more interest (either personal or professional) in the recipient than the recipient has in the gift giver.
However the friends angle is also very powerful. Most of our sales are to friends or indeed couples sending playful gifts to one another. Also to family members living far away.
We have discovered that in today's world people actually know very few addresses of their friends - so a tool that lets them "text" a physical gift as effortlessly as sending an emoji is actually very well received :)
Look at how many people nowadays just send a Facebook Happy Birthday message instead of a real card. In fact, I bet there is even an autoresponder in IFTTT to help send auto birthday messages.
Who know's what is real nowadays.
If it only takes 4 clicks to send a real gift to thank someone (or wish them a Happy Christmas), then this little app might be easy enough to help more of us connect with our virtual friends
We have a special feature for "surprise gifting". Simply tick a box on checkout and your Recipient will not know what gift they are accepting. They will have to wait for it to physically arrive at their door to find out what you purchased for them.
We help solve 2 things: 1. Curated content - hand-selecting the coolest gifts from the best retailers under 1 umbrella and 1 checkout 2. We save people time and effort so that they don't need to find out addresses. A phone number is all you need.
A-Z of gifting: taken care of by SwiftGift :)
I don't see why this couldn't be done in a Desktop browser (just enter a phone number/email address instead of selecting a contact).
We've gone mobile first because we are all about convenience. From your phone you can tap straight into your contacts and select a recipient with 2 taps. On browser you would need to look up a number (most people don't remember them off by heart) and then manually type it in...
We may well add a website at a future date but for now all our resources are focused on mobile: iOS App (voted by Apple "Best Gift App 2016), as well as iMessage App and Android App :)
On pricing - we are an aggregator and mostly resell items from large retailers like Amazon. Our commission comes from their margin so our pricing is very competitive :)
We do hope you will invest the time to install the free App and take a look around :)