Easily And Effectively Personalized Gift Card

Submitted 3 years ago

Gift giver selects a (potentially very large) cart of sample gift items and a gift card amount.

Recipient can buy any item in cart, adding their own funds if needed/desired. But the best part of this idea is the giver should be able to specify some tolerance for similar replacement items, and Amazon will allow the gift card to be used for items it deems similar enough to items in the cart.

Advantages: giver can even select items that they aren't completely confident what they exactly are (say, tech items), counting on the recipient to select something they understand and need that is similar. Recipient can customize items by selecting similar items with required features that giver didn't even understand. Giver does not feel they are just giving cash, but can easily restrict usage to categories of item that they have a connection with or feel is constructive. Amazon can notify giver of what was actually purchased with the card.

Example: I could give my espresso-loving son a coffee grinder without worrying about his inevitable need to pick his own coffee grinder. I could let him choose between a coffee grinder and several other completely unrelated categories by simply picking one item from each category for the gift cart.

Disadvantage: recipient has to do some shopping/selection work to get the best use of the card. This applies to any gift card, but may be worse once you have restricted the categories of item. Recipient may waste gift card: it could have an expiration upon which the funds return to giver if you want to be nice. Or Amazon would just profit from the unused card.