Amazon Now Allows You To Send Gift Cards To Friends On Facebook

As holiday shopping season ramps up, Amazon is announcing a new way to send a gift card to friends: Facebook. Now, when buying a gift card on Amazon you can connect your Facebook account send the personalized gift card to a Facebook friends (you can also send gift cards via mail, email and print certificates). The card will be posted on the recipient’s Facebook Wall.

Now on the gift card platform, you can choose to log-in to Facebook via Facebook Connect, which will allow Amazon to access your friends’ names and birthdays, and post the gift card to your friend’s Wall on the delivery date (Amazon says that user data and purchase history will remain private).

The sender can choose a gift card design, specify an amount up to $5,000 and provide an optional gift card message. Senders can schedule the gift card to appear on the recipient’s Facebook Wall up to a year in advance.

The gift card will be delivered via a post on the friend’s Facebook Wall (only the recipient can see the amount and claim code) And the sender can choose whether everyone can see the gift card message, or only the recipient. That’s actually an important feature because you may not want all of your friend’s Facebook friends to know you gave a friend a gift. As a buyer, I also wish that I could send the recipient a companion email, so that the he or she knows that I are giving them a gift on their Facebook wall.

To encourage shoppers to use the new feature, the first 10,000 customers who give an MP3-themed Amazon.com Gift Card to five different Facebook friends will get a $5 credit good for music downloads at Amazon MP3.

This integration with Facebook isn’t surprising. Amazon is increasingly turning towards to the social network to incorporate users’ social graph into their Amazon.com experience. A few months ago, Amazon rolled out a new social feature that allows users to receive recommendations based on information in your Facebook profile and friends preferences.