Online Shopping Sites

By Mark Chignell

Social gift giving involves a group of people teaming up to buy a gift for a particular recipient. For example, a group of people might want to buy a retirement gift for a work colleague.
Social Gift Giving is a type of social shopping, i.e.: “a method of e-commerce where shoppers” friends become involved in the shopping experience.” strangers to each other) buy together in order to get discounted prices. Social gift giving is a kind of social shopping that involves a gift giving community that brings like-minded people together to discuss, share, and shop.

Gift giving communities represent an attractive way to channel demand in social commerce. In many cases gift giving communities are looking for unique or special gifts, and for many groups quality may be just as important as price. Social interactions within gift giving communities support and differentiate products, and conversations about products can provide useful marketing data and opportunities for recommendations.

How can we help gift giving communities grow and prosper?
There are several methods for building a gift giving community, in addition to standard social media tools that are in widespread use for building online communities (cf., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_community).

Organized Catalogues. One of the hardest things for a gift giving community is finding a good, and well organized, set of potential gifts. GiveButtons is a gift giving community that was launched by Vocalage in July 2011. GiveButtons has a growing catalogue of products organized into categories such as electronics, outdoors, and kids as well as curated collections.

Gift giving is a highly social process and many people find the task of finding a unique and attractive gift to be challenging. Curated collections are an opportunity to see suggestions from expert gift givers. In GiveButtons, each collection has a number of products listed in it, organized by a theme that is described in a short paragraph.

The following sentences describe a collection of baby and kid’’s products group under the title, Age of Exploration, showing how narratives can be constructed around a group of products.

– The history books have it wrong, the age of exploration is not the 15th century, when Europeans discovered countries where others already lived, but 0-12. When kids are learning machines, before all the hormones and responsibilities set in. The tie-died baby reminds me of another age of exploration, the sixties, while the tuxedo onesie is a humorous reminder that we try and make kids grow up too fast. The other items in this collection are all about exploring and imagining in the wonderful time when anything is possible.–

One of the most important functions for social gift giving is a process that allows a group of people to buy a product together. Typically one person will choose a product and then invite friends or colleagues to contribute to it. Give Buttons can be attached to a product (rather like a Facebook “Like” button) and when people click on them they can invite others to purchase that product collaboratively with them. Give Buttons can be attached to products hosted in a collaborative gift giving community, or they can be attached to any product page and products that are available for group purchase. Those products can then be advertised to gift giving communities.

In this article we have highlighted collaborative gift giving and curated collections as important ways to facilitate social gift giving within gift giving communities. These methods are being implemented in GiveButtons, a leading example of the new breed of gift giving community envisioned here. While the techniques described here are important advances, they will need to be merged with other social media tools including online discussions, reviews, and recommendations, in order to facilitate the explosive growth in gift giving communities that we anticipate will occur in the next few years.

About The Author

Mark Chignell has taught at major Universities for over 25 years (First at the University of California and now at the University of Toronto). He founded Vocalage Inc. in 2003. In 2011 Vocalage launched the Give Buttons gift-giving community (http://www.givebuttons.com). Visit http://www.vocalage.com/givebuttons for more information on how to use Give Buttons with your friends or your products.