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Facebook Gifts

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151 pointstksohishi112 comments

I'm super bullish on this. I think this will end up being FB's first big cash cow. I never thought advertising was anything more than a stop-gap to cover costs, Zuck has always hated ads. Personally I thought their big revenue stream would probably be to start charging for FB Connect, but this makes more sense. They are basically hooking in at the right point of intent to convert a user, which is exactly why Google can print piles of money.

This is just step one. Once they get this working they are going to have all kinds of purchasing behavior and really be able to weave their way into all sorts of ecommerce scenarios. Their biggest challenge is going to be fulfillment (you don't want a birthday gift showing up late) so they are probably going to be very selective in who they partner with and are going to roll this out very slowly, since first impressions being good is essential.

Edit: Also there are all kinds of social experiments they can run to optimize conversions with this. If someone you know buys a gift for your friend, you are going to feel more pressure to do so. Etc.

I'm sure this is going to come up repeatedly: what can they offer me from an eCommerce perspective that Amazon can't? Like most social network benefits, I think friend recommendations, which I can and do get in real life, are overrated and useless for the majority of my purchases.

The gifting idea is quaint. But to be full-on eCommerce site, well that's yesterday's news.

This is going to turn Facebook into the Amazon for gifts. They capture you exactly at the right point, can (eventually) give pitch-perfect recommendations, and can get the checkout flow down to be completely painless. If they execute on this well (and I expect they will) I would guess most gift purchases will be happening on Facebook in a few years.

basically they are now on amazon's ground

I wonder what will make the world more ready for this than it was for Beacon back in the day (Amazon purchases automatically showing up in the News Feed).

And just imagine if Facebook did something like acquire Pinterest. You now instantly have their wish list for birthday (and holiday) gifts.

"It's Mary's birthday in 3 days - send her a birthday cupcake?"

I would probably click "yes" if it's < $5.

Not for every FB 'friend', but there's a 'sufficiently close' threshold where, yes, I'd click that button. Even better if it's day-of fulfillment. And I bet I'm not alone.

Now, instead of just a flood of empty messages on your birthday, you'll get a flood of empty calories, too.

Yeah this brings about an interesting dilemma; do I really want this crap? Can I reject it or swap it for something of equal value? Store their donation and add it with others' to actually get myself something I want?

Looks like you can swap it out: https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=226108584182842#How-do-I-...?

Good to know, thanks!

Would be interesting if they also added a pooling feature, where if you get multiple gifts, you can combine the original costs of all of them to get something nicer.

Definitely agree with this. Would cut down on wasted packaging as well.

Sounds like a carnival game ;)

Such a convenient way to make an empty and meaningless gesture!

Why would that be empty and meaningless? Sure, it's not much effort, but it's nice to know someone was thinking of you. The fact that it's not free gives it more weight than a simple "Happy Birthday" post.

They're not thinking of you because Facebook had to remind them.

Try making your birthday private in Facebook one year and see how many happy birthday messages you get when people aren't prodded by Facebook to care. It's a lot less.

That doesn't mean that people don't care. I certainly wouldn't able to remember the birthday of all my closest friends, but I do care and am glad to be reminded. On the other hand, there are of course a ton of bday wishes from people who probably don't really care, but is that really a bad thing?

Yeah, I think you can be reasonably good friends with someone and not remember their birthday. Unless you are really focusing on it you are going to have a limited bandwidth for remembering birthdays and likely have more people you genuinely care about sending your best wishes than you can remember.

I've reached the number of friends on Facebook where at least ONE person is having a birthday every day.

I probably only post 10-15 "happy birthday!" posts a year. So every day I check to see who's birthday it is. If it's someone I'm close to, then I post something.

If Facebook didn't have them displayed, I would probably have those 15 birthdays written down on a real world calendar, and I'd just check that.

Just a few more poorly measured statistics from me: I have 1200+ friends, have about 10-15 birthdays a week. Never post on their walls, don't have my birthday listed. Get maybe 10-15 wishes a year on my wall. Text/call about 10-15 people a year (not including family). Before I removed my birthday, I had about 700 friends and would get around 100 wall posts.

Going to try an experiment where I make a random day my birthday, delete all the posts that catch on to the fake birthday, and then change it to a month later. Will post results.

Yeah, I have seen people do this, definitely will get a lot of messages still. Facebook limits the amount of times you can change your birthday, likely because of this.

My google calendar reminds me of birthdays. Is it google who cares and not me?

You were pro-active and took steps to remember the birthdays by sticking them on your calendar. It's different from clicking on a link because Facebook remembered someone's birthday.

Why? Not many people remember many peoples' birthdays: I know that because of Facebook I don't need to proactively ask for and store most friends' birthdays because I'll be actively reminded of them.

In reference to OP, it's a matter of thoughtfulness. A Facebook birthday notification happens whether you're thinking of a person or not. At least, if you put it on your calendar, you had to sacrifice some time and energy.

Not to say that you're less thoughtful for using Facebook reminders; it just seems to promote shallow interactions at times.

> Sure, it's not much effort

The greatest gift you can give someone is your time.

Such cynicism.

Fat chance (pun intended) once you include s&h...

It's an interesting idea and relevant to one of the major actions users take on facebook (birthday/well wishes).

I think you're right that it's "sufficiently close", but I'm struggling with how I define that. It's essentially someone close enough that I would give them a gift, but not so close that giving them a gift through FB is too impersonal.

Do you have friends that you call or hang out with on their birthday but don't write on their wall? Most of my fb well wishes are from loose connections. My real friends call, text or hang out with me on my bday. Facebook is the least personal touchpoint I'm available through, but maybe I'm an exception.

PS - I think it's been said, but combining gifts is probably the key here(i.e. everyone chips in to get you something).

That's my issue with this. My 'friend' list isn't really a list of friends. That's not Facebook's fault[1] though.

[1] arguable?

I'm interested to see who they partner up with on this. I'd be very open to the idea of using a service like this.

"Now you can do something more meaningful" (than a hey, happy birthday call or message). It disappoints me when I hear wording like this, there is nothing more meaningful about paying money for a present that took you two clicks and is probably already part of a pre-selected group of items from their profile/history, than thinking of something to write on their wall in two clicks.

All power to Facebook to make it work though: maybe if they can monetize themselves through means like this they'll pay more attention to privacy issues as they will have less incentive to make everything public for advertising/selling data.

I'd rather get a message from someone than a cupcake with no personal message any day of the week. When I was a child and I cared more about material objects that the people around me and whether or not they care for me, I would have picked the cupcake. But I don't use Facebook either, so I guess this whole Gift's thing doesn't really apply to me.

There's got to be a technology that allows attaching message to the said cupcake.

A message simply saying "Happy birthday!" isn't particularly personal either. I made my birthday unpublic to avoid them.

(But I'm atypical in that I don't particularly care about birthdays.)

"...pay more attention to privacy issues..."

I doubt it as Zuckerberg has never cared about privacy.[1]

1. http://pleasedeletefacebook.com

Just a note: when you have one citation and it's at the end, don't bother formalizing it with the fancy footnoting. It's especially obnoxious appended to snark.

True, but just because it's not very meaningful doesn't mean people won't use it. We don't live in an ideal world. If we did, nobody would buy prewritten greeting cards or flowers, which are essentially the same thing as a Facebook gift: Something that shows you care without requiring much thought.

Oooh, now that's the way to get real names + addresses out of people. Neat. It also involves social pressure -- now not giving away your address will mean rejecting a gift.

Not to mention those among us who may have been less than truthful about their birthdates.

I swear, I really was born on 1/1/1970. I'm a epoch baby! Ok, maybe not.

If you lied to facebook about your birthdate, your friends will get incorrect birthday notifications from facebook. This surprises you why?

I think at this point you will just have to hide your birthday from fb.

And miss out on getting a bunch of stuff from my friends? Ha!

That's an interesting insight! I'm curious, does anyone know how much more valuable a user is (in $$$) if they have a confirmed real name + address vs. unconfirmed?

Hugely... Especially if you're developing a payments platform.

I thought about the address part too. However, don't they already have locations from smart phones to determine where you live, where you work and where you hang out.

Doing anything with addresses is risky from a legal and privacy perspective - I doubt facebook can get away with snailmail spam without permission, for example. Nor do I think they want to do that.

For geographic targeting IPs and user-entered information are usually good enough. Also, as gsharma mentions, facebook has tons of geographic information on users from mobile, which is better because it reflects where you actually spend your time and doesn't go stale.

I doubt facebook will extract much value from physical addresses. Rather, I think this is purely part of their monetization strategy. They can double the average user's contribution to their revenue from a single five dollar purchase. Also, I'm wondering if this is facebook's attempt at building a payments platform. I think this industry will be worth tons of money in the short and long term future.

I've believed that building a payments platform is the road to riches for Facebook for a long time. They have such a headstart on the fraud and identity issue, and they have both the merchants via FB connect, and the customers (obviously).

FB doesn't want real names and addresses so they can start sending out snailmail spam, they want them so that they can start user matching with advertising partners' CRM databases.

All depends on the quality of the gifts. If they're chintzy, good luck. But if it's quality stuff, cool. It's got to be of a higher level than Zynga was for apps.

Facebook would be served best by controlling gift quality with an iron fist. I'm a little skeptical they'll do that, but maybe.

This is very cool, though "Friends ... can swap for a different size, flavor or style before the gift ships."

Still. Quality. Quality. Quality.

I would love to be able to send books.

Example: when my distant friends announce that they are expecting a baby I usually have to contact them to get mailing info so I can send them one of my favorite children's books. If Facebook can make this happen in just a few clicks, then I'll gladly use their service.

Why wouldn't they just do a deal with Amazon?

As a selected vendor, I must say they do seem focused on quality. I'm clearly biased but the impression I got from the buyer is they're being very picky.

Another thing that will be tricky is separating signal and noise. If I'm buying a birthday gift for my punk rock friend, they shouldn't bother showing me cupcakes and chocolate boxes. Seems like a no-brainer to show me gift options based on his likes.

I would love to hear more, if you have more to share.

They're selling a lot of things that you would expect to see on fab.com. And I think they only have 100 vendors to start?

All Things D has a good write up: http://allthingsd.com/20120927/say-hello-to-gifts-facebooks-...

I'm friends with a few people on Facebook who I'd consider to be very popular. 1000+ friends with many guys vying after their attention. Every time they post a picture of themselves it will be hit with 50 likes (mostly from males) in the first hour.

I bet these people will be swimming in gifts once it's released.

So the skills one learns pretending to be a female elf in World Of Warcraft will soon let you get real swag.

Excuse me while I switch over to Google Images to gather some fake profile pics.

A much better idea than the original 'virtual gifts'. I could really see this taking off although it will take some time to reach users around the world. Maybe they will partner with Amazon for distribution. I wonder how this would affect Facebook's bottom line if a large percentage of their users started taking advantage of it. Combined with the birthday notifications everyone is used to it could generate significant revenue.

e.g. What is you clicked a birthday notification and instead of just an option to post to the persons wall you could send a gift? Lots of opportunity here for Facebook to integrate this.

Edit: just watched the video and they are integrating with birthdays.

Is this the result of the Karma acquisition [1]?

[1]http://blog.getkarma.com/post/23305446792/karma-is-moving-to...

Signs certainly point to yes.

More than signs: https://www.facebook.com/blake/posts/466860813344232

When I first started reading, I thought "Now THIS is something Facebook should have been doing all along. It's a perfect fit.". Then I read:

2. Your friend is notified instantly

Friends enter their own shipping info and can swap for a different size, flavor or style before the gift ships.

What!? This seems like a huge product miss. It's almost the equivalent of buying someone a gift card. It removes the element of surprise that makes gift giving great and takes a lot of personality out of giving the gifts. I get that it's more practical but since when has giving gifts been about practicality?

IMO it would be a much better implementation to say "a friend is sending you a gift! Fill out your address so we can ship it out to you: ...".

Here is something interesting Facebook can/may do: Apart from showing variations of the gifts (such as colors, flavors, etc.) have another option of "Save $xx as Facebook Credits." Once people have Facebook Credit sitting in their accounts they'll be more inclined to use Facebook to pay for things.

It looks like Facebook allows businesses to add their products into their "Gift Store"

https://www.facebook.com/help/444702442234880

This might be a great way to get your physical product in front of millions of people.

Perfect for local business shops too. Think of a local flower shop, I bet birthday orders could be huge for that type of thing. It scales decently as well if the business adds itself.

Does this mean I can buy my friends a beer? Because that'll be better than buying them a ... cupcake.

Cupcakes are, at the moment, a far less heavily regulated industry.

You should buy them beer irl :(

Even reading the title of this sent me into a downward spiral of intense paranoia/hatred/annoyance/terror. Was gift giving not already enough of a stilted, rote interaction? Do we need to systematize EVERYTHING!?! Is there no escape from this? What have we become?

You sound like you could use a gift.

In case you have a feeling of deja vu:

Last Call for Facebook Gifts (https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=405727117130)

I think FB needs a lot more of this. Their API is basically essential for many tech startups these days, and a lot of things 3rd parties are doing they could and should be doing themselves. Where is the FB game development studio? The FB Spotify competitor (not FB music that was a rubbish attempt)? FB Yelp? FB amazing-idea-of-tomorrow-that-utilizes-the awesome-power-of-nearly-a-billion-users?

I still think the FB marketplace is something they haven't spent nearly enough time on. Oodle just isn't cutting it, and FB could easily compete with eBay or Craigslist. In fact, Facebook should be competing with CL in everything. I don't think it needs to be motivated by revenue, but by an actual desire to make amazing products using the FB graph in all those areas. Just some thoughts.

Anyone remember the old Facebook gifts? The ones that were virtual? People even paid for those! I think people will for sure participate in this. Who doesn't want to extend a nice gesture to their friend.

I do. I'm not aware of anyone I know actually buying anything, we were always searching for the free ones when it was birthday or flirting time. But then again, university students have a lot of time to invest into free.

For some reason I've had 4 Facebook credits on my account since that era even though I never bought any.

I think this is brilliant. Shouting "Happy Birthday" is really the most consistently used feature of Facebook, it makes a lot of sense to turn it into an opportunity to sell something - and lower the barrier for people to send gifts (there's a lot of steps involved in getting a greeting card and addressing it and buying a stamp...)

And they could size this up over time - like, ten of your friends from college are going in $1-each on sending you flowers after your recent breakup. I think people would actually do that.

They should automate it. Add a registry of stuff we want, have people set up automatic deductions when (good) friends hit their birthdays/anniversaries, add up the amount of cash and buy whatever it can afford, send thank-you letter to each person, and a "pleasure" email back. And a "we must get together soon" discussion, also automated.

Much as it's nice receiving the smallest personal message from someone you haven't spoken to, I am a touch jaded at how automatic birthday reminders are. Can you tell? :)

This is going to be great for merchants that can get on. I'd imagine Facebook are going to be even harder to work with than something like the Amazon Marketplace, the last thing they will want is what should be low friction gift transactions to go wrong.

As someone who sells online in cosmetics (which covers a to of stuff that makes good gifts) I do hope they open it up a fair amount. I would imagine though they are going to be fairly restrictive for a long time about who they partner with though.

May be Facebook will open it's 'Gifts market place' to finely-tested eCommerce businesses through an API!!

This is more meaningful, because Facebook doesn't want to be an eCommerce company. It's vision is connecting the world. And it makes more sense to open the platform to external businesses which are tested for 'great experience'. In this way Facebook itself will not have to be another eCommerce company and it can have just enough control, share and work over the platform.

May be Facebook will open it's Gift market place to finely-tested eCommerce businesses through an API!!

This is why Facebook acquired Karma.

Facebook as payment system? I still don't have enough confidence on how secure their system is. Also, sharing home address with them is not a smart move.

It sounds like they should let you update your privacy settings to automatically reject gifts if you dont want to share your address... Something like "sorry, this person is not accepting Facebook Gifts".

And why would they not try to tease you letting you know someone has sent you a gift? I wonder if at some point they'll have a malfunction that tells everyone a gift is waiting for them, and so they need to fill in their address details..

It's 2012. Credit card companies repeatedly said you're responsible for $0 of unauthorized charges. Vendors have to be PCI-compliant.

What other provisions would make you more comfortable regarding transacting online?

I know it's not the same thing that the OP said, but, given Facebook's track record with privacy, there is no way I am giving them my CC number and home address.

I don't see anyone else mentioning this, but this is probably the rebranded version of this year's acquisition, Karma Science.

Yep, it is, see Jared Morgenstern's recent post regarding Facebook Gifts:

"[...] We looked so hard that we found a company called Karma who quite literally dreamt about social gifting. Lee Linden and Ben Lewis, their vision, and their team, impressed us so much that we acquired their company, and four months later, we're ready to unveil what they've been working on."

As long as the gifts are more useful and desirable than their last implementation of facebook gifts, and they can provide a good API for the fulfiller of the gift to fulfill the order, whether it be virtual or physical, this could be really great. I think it'd also be a good idea if you could get numerous friends to chip in for a gift.

Any Facebookers around who work on this? It would be really sweet to have a few "Charitable Giving" options. The more the merrier. Everyone in my family does charitable donations for Christmas / some birthdays, and it'd be fun to do it for people who I'd normally just message.

Amazon without all the fulfillment overhead and all the event driven and social context. First pass was virtual gifts right? This is physical. Interesting, but needs some major fortitude.

Pick out the perfect gift, add your message and it's ready to ship – no address needed.

I'm intrigue with that no address needed. How to ship without the address?

The recipient is notified of the gift, then needs to input their own shipping address.

This is probably a good time to think about buying FB stock.

Now I'm really going to have to worry about leaving my account open on my devices. They didn't show it but these payments need some type of password protection.

One of the few product launches you see nowadays that does not have a share button. Why facebook didn't put a share button on there is puzzling.

This seems like the entirely wrong thing to optimize. There are so many other opportunities for Facebook to monetize:

  - group buying around deals, or group buying in general
  - "Pay by Facebook" Facebook Connect based payment system
  - Facebook Presence based loyalty programs

among many other easier things than gifts. Gifting does not seem like low hanging fruit.

This is fundamentally social and something that pretty much only Facebook can do. I know that there are a lot of companies trying to compete in the loyalty, group buying, and payment platforms.

Yes, but Facebook has a billion users and the ability to make the right relationships with literally every card processor. And, group buying is inherently social. I don't see why these aren't at the top of Facebook's list for things to try.

Is group buying inherently social? I've never participated, nor has anyone in my circle asked me to. Maybe I'm just in the wrong circle.

gifting is low-hanging fruit in the physical space.

Looks like http://www.treater.com/

Treater is more about instant (treat your friend to something which they can get right away) and small "just because" type stuff. Disclaimer: I work there.

I had this idea a couple of years ago. I'm interested to see how well this works.

I am wondering why did they announce it before they actually push it out to users?

The voice in the video sounds a lot like Mark Zuckerberg, can anyone else confirm?

I don't know whose voice that is, but it definitely isn't Zuck.

There is an excessive amount of cynical snark in this thread.

I would love to see Etsy get in on this.

WTF?

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