Facebook will shut down its physical gifts service this week | Hacker News Reader

Facebook will shut down its physical gifts service this week

fastcompany.com

47 pointskevingibbon21 comments

Most of the times I ordered physical gifts, it worked great. But... Myself, and two other friends I've talked to have all had the experience of ordering a Facebook gift, and no order was placed with the supplier, or it took days for the supplier to receive the order. Of course, there's no number at Facebook to call.

It took me 3 days to get a response from Facebook through their help system.

Meanwhile, Facebook had already told my grandmother flowers were on the way. They even provided a tracking number that did not exist.

I wonder how much the lack of customer support played a role in the 20% physical goods number. IMHO physical gifts was a poorly executed feature.

In their defense there's no good software out there that hooks into a vendor's fulfillment house. FB created a proprietary order system which sent emails to the vendor when an order came in. Then the vendor had to create an packing slip or send the order to their fulfillment house on THEIR proprietary shipping system.

There's so many shipping systems out there and none of them talk to each other. If someone were to create software that integrated every vendor with every distributor I think they would do very well for themselves.

From what I understand, this feature originally came from the acquisition of a startup called Karma. I wonder what the acqui-hired employees are going to do now.

Correct:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/18/facebook-acquires-karma/

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/27/facebook-gifts/

The latter article is very funny in retrospect.

I'm still pissed off that this died off before there was an international roll-out. If my friends and I are all in the SF bay area, I'm going to get off my butt and give the gift in person and head out on the town to celebrate together.

The very use case I wanted for Facebook gifts were when I'm in California and want to send gifts to friends back in Canada (and vice versa).

Ditto -- this was a great idea, and I was hoping to see an international roll-out as well. I am an American living abroad (SE Asia) and often find it difficult to reconnect with my friends, so I've used it a few times in the past month, thankfully without any of issues/horror stories as described here.

Sure, maybe the gifts are cheesy (coffee mugs, etc) and limited, but I have always found that a real physical product in someone's hands has more impact than an impersonal gift card. I'm sad to see this service go, but I hope someone steps into this niche.

The service was weird. I got a gift on my birthday... or more correctly... I got an email on my birthday asking me to pick which box of chocolates I wanted. I didn't actually get the gift for like a week. My birthday was over at that point. It didn't seem like a good model to me.

The gifts sucked, that was the main problem. Pretty simple really. Also, they were absurdly expensive. The fact that 80% of people went for gift cards says little about the "physical" aspect and everything about the price point and what you could actually buy. People in real life buy physical gifts all the time, obviously.

Facebook should try again and partner with a site like Etsy (disclaimer: I used to work there) to provide users with an inventory of actually meaningful and cool items customized for the person they're sending to, not mass produced garbage or fatty junk food like cookies and candy that will just sit for a while and get tossed. Receiving a Facebook Gift should feel warm and fuzzy, not like a robot delivered you a souped-up McDonald's Happy Meal. To address the price problem, they should make it straightforward and easy for multiple friends to throw in $10 each for a nice, meaningful gift together. They'd make a fortune.

You could tell physical gifts were a dud within a few weeks of their rollout.

Facebook should test its ideas better before full-scale rollout. Launch a feature at a few schools, test the adoption metrics, and rebuild for scale if it gets traction.

Of course, this assumes they didn't do exactly that. Can anyone within the walls comment?

> "Facebook should test its ideas better before full-scale rollout."

Most of the time they do, and I imagine they did with this, as well. Did I miss any evidence in the article that suggested that they didn't? Just because they are turning it off now doesn't mean at the beginning it wasn't successful.

I never liked this service and found it an annoyance that every time one of my friends had a birthday, this thing would be bugging me with these minor value items. If it were a person I give gifts to, I would have bought them something already, and it would be something more personalized.

I actually really liked the physical gifts thing. I never use FB and recently removed pretty much all of my info, but a friend sent me a birthday present through this service and it was pretty cool! I even got the gift in 2 days.

It seems like the main vulnerability was that it was built in true "scalable" Facebook style, but gifts need a more personal touch, which is harder to scale.

I actually had a physical gift given to me (it was a cookie, I think), but I did not feel comfortable with giving my physical address for delivery. For some reason, though Facebook knows a huge amount about me, it seemed like too little reward for too much information. (Note, I am aware that they may only have been passing the data to the vendor, but I still felt uneasy).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4076872 "Facebook Launches Simple Mobile Payments."

Trust factor amongst the technocracy (here), but I wonder if this will have the same end-result of non-usage.

I had a product on FB gifts. It sold great on sites like Fab, but did terrible on FB. I think we sold less than 5 units total before getting kicked out.

This tweet from Chris Dixon a year ago summed it up best for me: "It's all about the mental state. are you sharing photos online vs giving something offline. the numbers show it's hard to switch".

Discussion on this from 11 months ago - enjoy https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4582834

They will probably end up buying a company that specializes in selling physical products (TheFancy, Cosmic Cart, Luvocracy, etc.).

Facebook already did in May 2012. It was called Karma. Facebook Gifts is based off of the Karma platform.

Does it say much that I didn't even know they did that?

Thank you facebook. It was really annoying anyway.

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