Gift cards are soulless and buying the wrong gift leads to annoying returns. But you might not know if your loved one would prefer a drone, action camera or a VR headset. With Snappy Gifts, they get to choose. Snappy Gifts is a new startup offering a fresh new approach that takes the guess-work out of generosity.
Pick the suggested gift or swap it for one you like better
You go to Snappy Gift’s app, choose a price range and then select from a collection of gifts your recipient will choose from, like ‘gadgets’, ‘cooking’, ‘outdoors’ or ‘teens.’ You can then designate a suggested gift from legit brands like DJI drones, Amazon mobile devices, GoPros, Prada clothing and Kate Spade purses. Without having to pay up front, you send the digital present.
The recipient gets to virtually scratch to reveal the suggested gift. They can then accept it, or pre-swap it for anything else in the collection within your price range. You’ll receive an email asking you to pay the standard retailer price of the present, and Snappy Gifts ships it off. Snappy Gifts cuts deals for discounts from the manufacturers, and keeps the average 10 percent margin between the wholesale price and what it charges you.
Recipients get to virtually scratch to reveal their suggested gift
Snappy Gifts has plenty of advantages, especially if you can’t deliver a physical gift in person:
- No time wasted shopping in brick-and-mortar stores
- No worries that you’re buying them the wrong gift and forcing them through the chore of returning it
- No impersonal, anti-climactic gift cards that don’t show what they could get
- No overpaying for gift cards they’ll forget to use
And because Snappy Gifts curates a selection of popular, brand-name products, it’s easy to send something awesome even if you can’t imagine what to send.
Snappy Gifts is still a little rough around the edges. The design needs polish, and you can only send a gift from its iOS app — not the web or Android. There are some gimmicky Sharper Image-reject gifts in the collections. And if the giver is a deadbeat, a recipient might pick a gift that never ends up getting paid for and sent.
Conceived in Tel Aviv and built in San Francisco, Snappy Gifts has been bootstrapped but is now trying to raise a seed round of funding. It will have to compete directly with Loop & Tie, which has a gorgeous website but crappy gifts that seem like rip-offs at their price points. There’s also traditional giving and gift cards, as well as startups like Gyft, Giftagram, Swift Gift and Jifiti. But none of those make it so easy for people to pick what they want and get it quickly.
Give the gift of choice.