14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has decided to shut down Gifts, the feature that no one ever used. The last day the feature will be available is August 12, so there are a few more days left to go.
The company has decided to stop selling gift cards for businesses such as Starbucks, Sephora, Domino’s Pizza, Best Buy and iTunes, to name just a few, but it doesn’t want to stop selling stuff.
“We’ll be using everything we learned from Gifts to explore new ways to help businesses and developers drive sales on the web, on mobile, and directly on Facebook,” the company’s statement reads.
Basically, the entire team that was handling the Gifts section will be moving on to take care of other efforts designed to monetize this huge potential the social network has.
For instance, the Buy button that was recently introduced can be used to make ecommerce purchases on Facebook, while Custom Audiences enables brick and mortar merchants to retarget Facebook ads to existing customers.
Facebook has big chances to make money from selling ads and charging a small share of the revenues made via the Buy button on the platform. Even so, it should be mentioned that Facebook makes most of its cash from advertising deals.
Gifts was launched back in September 2012 to a limited number of users from the United States. The feature was integrated following the company’s acquisition of Karma, an app that was used to buy various cute gifts, such as flowers and chocolate.
Since this is Facebook we’re talking about, you probably don’t even know every person on your Friends list, much less where they live. In order to not ruin the surprise, the social network allowed people to send presents to their friends and have them see the gift on their pages. The package was delivered with a personal message from the sender and asked for them to provide a shipping address.
Despite original expectations for the feature to be a hit, it didn’t really rise to the expectations. One of the main problems was the fact that shipping inside the United States was ok, but in the rest of the world, it was dodgy at best.
Not even when Gifts was integrated with the birthday calendar did it manage to become the success Facebook was hoping for.
Later on, in August 2013, Facebook decided to quit trying to ship presents to people and chose to focus on gift cards, especially since they were already a big part of the sales they were already making.
Given the fact that on August 12 Gifts is retiring, it’s probably safe to say that things didn’t work out as expected.