Facebook Gifts

» see facebook.com/gifts as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Facebook Gifts launched on 27 September 2012 and it was Facebook's first serious attempt to be a shop. The pitch was tidy enough that you can see why it got funded internally. Facebook already knew whose birthday it was and it was already putting a notification in front of you about it. All that was missing was a button that turned the notification into a box of chocolate arriving at a real address.

The product came out of Karma, a sixteen-person mobile gifting startup in San Francisco that Facebook bought on 18 May 2012, which happened to be the day of its own IPO. Gifts opened to a subset of American users and widened from there, and the catalog was physical: coffee, cupcakes, socks, teddy bears. Later there were digital codes from chains like Starbucks and Target, and eventually a plastic Facebook Card you could reload and use at several chains. Facebook took an undisclosed cut of every order.

In 2012 I had a Facebook account like everybody else in Turkey, and this tab was never on it. Gifts was an American rollout for its entire twenty-two months, which is the part that gets lost when people remember it: outside the United States it was a headline about Facebook getting into commerce, not a thing sitting in your own interface. The distance here is a shipping address, not a decade.

~ the record ~

~ from chocolate to gift cards ~

The physical goods lasted less than a year. In August 2013 Facebook dropped them entirely and kept only cards and digital codes, and it gave the reason itself: cards were already eighty percent of what people bought. Sending someone a mug involved warehouses and returns and a delivery date, and Facebook was not going to become good at any of that. Sending someone twenty dollars of Starbucks was an email.

That decision made the numbers less embarrassing and made the product pointless at the same time. A gift card store attached to a birthday alert is a coupon business, and there were already a dozen of those that did not require the world's largest social network to build them.

~ two weeks' notice ~

Facebook announced the end on 29 July 2014 and closed Gifts on 12 August. The stated reason was a change of position rather than a failure: the company said it wanted to help other businesses sell through Facebook rather than sell things itself, and pointed at the Buy button it was testing and at the ad products that let a shop go and find its own customers. Both of those went on to make far more money than Gifts ever did.

~ the inheritance ~

Facebook kept coming back to commerce and kept refusing to hold the inventory. Marketplace, shops inside Instagram, checkout, live shopping: the shape is always the same, a payment rail and a discovery surface with somebody else's warehouse behind it. Gifts is where that lesson got paid for, and it cost the company almost nothing to learn, which is probably why it is the least remembered thing Facebook has ever switched off.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »