Instant Digital Gift Delivery Permeates the Mainstream This Upcoming Holiday Season

On October 4, Amazon introduced a new feature to its Prime members: instant digital gift delivery — no mailing address needed. Now, Amazon Prime members can browse “millions of products” available on the Amazon Shopping app, add a gift receipt, and let the recipient provide their own delivery address. If the recipients don’t like their gift, they have the option of exchanging the item for an Amazon gift card. As it stands today, there is no way to opt out of the feature.

While it’s exciting to see Amazon’s new feature make gifting accessible for Prime members this holiday season, it’s a space that SmartGift has pioneered and perfected for years. We’ve been forefronting innovation with address-less and seamless gifting technology for our brand partners since 2013.

According to a recent Forbes article, “SmartGift didn’t follow any of these well-trodden — and highly inefficient — paths. It cracked the code in online gifting that solves some of the biggest problems inherent in these traditional business models. And it adds exciting new capabilities for retailers to deliver a more satisfying and personalized gifting experience for both gifters and giftees.”

Danzinger adds that, “Its technology is so revolutionary that it was just granted a patent. And its list of participating partners includes brands like 1-800-Flowers, Pandora, Kendra Scott, Movado, vineyard vines, Timberland, Jansport, NBC Universal, Two Faced and Aveda.”

The fastest-growing gift-based ecommerce platform, SmartGift helps shoppers give the perfect, personalized gift, every time. Our patented Send with SmartGift technology leverages AI and real-time gifting data that tailors the gifting experience to the recipient’s preferences. This helps retailers and brands become more people-centric as they approach marketing and personalization.

We understand the three to six months it takes to convert physical or online gift cards into transactions. We recognize that, at any given time, 10% to 19% of gift card balances remain unredeemed — and around 6% of gift cards are never used. This is why our mission is to help merchants where gift card exchanges fall short; we help boost conversion rates by providing easy, instantaneous, and seamless gift conversion.

At SmartGift, we believe it’s important for both large and small retailers to embrace the capabilities that empower gift givers. But with the recent proliferation of digital gift delivery platforms, and the 2021 holiday season swiftly approaching, it’s all the more important for retailers and businesses to choose the right path to opening a gift funnel on their ecommerce website.

Remember: the best ecommerce platform serves as an additional marketing tool for businesses.

Let’s take a look at 5 reasons why SmartGift offers the most unique and pain-free experience, built specifically with retailers in mind.

Reduced Holiday Returns and Exchanges

A SmartGift leads to the perfect gift, every time. Unlike Amazon and other ecommerce gifting solutions, we offer recipients the option to swap their gift for a different item, size, color, or any other attribute specific to a retailer’s catalog. This removes gift purchase inhibition for gift givers, empowers recipients with the gift of choice, and creates a greater conversion follow-through for retailers.

Furthore, brands like Eagle Creek, Hanna Andersson, JanSport, Smartwool, and Timberland have made a positive sustainability impact by adding the SmartGift technology to their sites. According to SmartGift’s data findings, nearly one in four recipients made changes to the original gift, opting for a different size, color, fragrance, or swapping the gift for a different item altogether before it was shipped to their homes.

This dramatically reduced ecommerce packaging waste, carbon emissions, and delivery contact commonly associated with ecommerce returns (a majority of which is disposed of in landfills, instead of ending up for resale on the platform).

Today, more than a third of Americans (that’s thirty-four percent!) return gifts they receive over the holidays. By eliminating gift returns, retailers can automatically eliminate all the waste associated with them, reducing your brand’s emission footprint at every point in the supply chain.

Leader of Address-less Gifting

SmartGift has pioneered address-less gifting technology, perfecting it with years of consumer behavior studies and ecommerce experience with over 40 top brand partners. Now, gift givers no longer need to have their recipient’s address in order to send them a token of appreciation.

In 2020 alone, SmartGift saw more than 600 percent overall ecommerce growth — a sixfold increase in gift orders successfully given and received. For some platform brands, SmartGift transaction volume accounted for 10 percent of total online revenue on Mother’s Day.

“With end-to-end transaction time dropping to an average of only 21 minutes — compared with three to six months for gift cards — we’ve seen dozens of new retailers sign on to the platform,” says CEO Monika Kocchar.

Complete Visibility on End-to-End Analytics

Unlike Amazon and other ecommerce gifting solutions, the data behind every Smart Gift is fed into the Gift Genome™ to provide retailers insights around products with the most gift intent, key ecommerce metrics, and sender and recipient demographics, location, age, and more. Put simply, retailers have complete visibility through ecommerce analytics and ecommerce fulfillment.

In 2020, data from the Gift Genome™ allowed retailers to see expanded and diversified demographic data like an increase among users between 55 and 65 years of age (15%), 45 and 54 years of age (17%), and 25 to 34 year olds (25%).

These insights are direct and actionable for the retailer as they demystify the gifting process and reasoning behind consumer gifting. SmartGift’s Gift Genome™ allows retailers to track and gain reports on each and every transaction made.

Growing Global Presence in International Markets

With consumers turning to online shopping more than ever before, we understand how important it is to send holiday presents to loved ones from afar. This is why prioritize international partnerships.

While Amazon’s program is limited specifically to mobile devices in the continental US, SmartGift continues to revolutionize online gifting across the global market.

Offering easy-to-expand access on international sites and a quick, hands-off setup for online retailers, our patented Send as a Gift Technology is easy to integrate worldwide.

SmartGift is now available through Timberland’s Canada website and Pandora’s Canada, France, Germany, Spain and UK’s websites. Our gifting services are also available with bareMinerals in the UK and MAC in Australia. Plus, we’re always looking to expand into new markets.

The process is simple: provide translations targeted at your local shopper audience, and take care of the rest! Local payment methods are supported by default through our unique patented gift giving flow.

Unique Personalization Opportunities

Sending the right gift isn’t easy — this explains why so many gifters have traditionally gravitated toward “safe gifts” like gift cards. But gift cards have a downside: they’re impersonal and tend to create a disconnect between the recipient and the retailer’s product pages.

The team at SmartGift recognizes this, which is why we developed a unique, innovative, and reliable technology with built-in consumer choice and customizations.

Our goal is simple: to connect people through gifting. Our people-oriented technology helps retailers build the perfect gifting experience by taking the effort and stress out of marketing the giftability of products, while also establishing a special virtual and contactless experience for the gift giver and the recipient.

With SmartGift, the recipient receives a gift notice instantly — an aspect that preserves the surprise and delight of in-person gifting. Then, with endless customization opportunities at hand, the recipient gets to tailor the gift to their taste, making it a delightful experience all around.

With COVID-19 changing the way we celebrate with our loved ones, we have dedicated ourselves to providing every consumer the chance to maintain personal yearly traditions — in-person or virtually.

Since 2020, SmartGift has offered free greeting cards to customers, created COVID-19-friendly gift guides, developed a gift scheduling feature, and launched internationally to celebrate special moments like birthdays, anniversaries, December global holidays, and more within our local and global communities.

“Everyone at SmartGift has been reflecting on how we can further our services and partner with new brands to provide our unique experience that is interactive and designed to delight, engage, and enable seamless gifting,” says SmartGift CEO Monika Kocchar.

“We are honored to be working with such one-of-a-kind and remarkable companies that offer items that commemorate moments like engagements, proposals, a new birth, or creating memories with our children,” adds Kocchar.

The past nineteen months have shown us that virtual celebrations are here to stay. With the holiday season only months away, retail news indicating that pandemic-related product shortages and disruptions are once again at bay, our plans of celebrating with loved ones are subject to constant change. Now is the time to start planning for the holiday season ahead.

In 2021, gifting is the connective tissue that bridges old traditions and helps us create new ones.

Together, let’s empower shoppers and recipients with the perfect gift every time.

For more ecommerce business ideas and solutions, check out the SmartGift platform or request a demo here.

SmartGift’s Holiday Merchant Series aims to assist retailers with top gifting problems like high return rates, unsustainable practices, and non-engaging gift funnels by expanding their virtual capabilities.