On the back of Facebook's quarterly results, the social network has announced an initiative it hopes will give its social gifting platform a boost.
Facebook's Gifts platform was announced in September last year, and has been running in the US since. The service allows users to select and send gifts to their friends via the social network. The recipient can "unwrap" a virtual version of the gift, and the physical gift is delivered directly to their door shortly after purchase.
Now with the introduction of Facebook Cards, users can send friends gift vouchers for particular retailers; the gift balance is then automatically added to the recipient's Facebook Card, which they can then swipe in store.
The service is being rolled out in the US and currently includes Target, Olive Garden, Sephora and Jamba Juice. Facebook has indicated before that it is looking to expand its Gifts platform to other regions, but has not yet given any definite timeline.
The social network says: "Facebook Cards are reusable. After you've received a card, the next time you get a Facebook Card gift, it will instantly be added to your existing card. Your card can hold multiple gift balances, and each balance is dedicated to the retailer associated with the gift."
Users can view their Facebook Card balances via their account settings on Facebook, both on desktop and mobile. As the balances change, Facebook sends the user real-time mobile notifications.
During Facebook's earnings conference call on Wednesday, CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg indicated Gifts is currently only bringing in a small amount of revenue for the social network.
He added: "I do want to temper near-term expectations a little bit on revenue coming from other areas like Gifts or Graph Search. I think these can be big opportunities for us long-term, but for the foreseeable future, the most important thing for us is to continue building out great consumer experiences around these products. We're going to invest in these, but for the next year at least our work around ads will have by far the biggest impact on our business."
Need to optimise
According to the numbers, in the fourth quarter, payments and other revenue from sources outside of games was around $5 million. Zuckerberg said user-promoted posts were the primary contributor to that figure, and Gifts to a lesser extent.
Responding to a question about why revenue from Gifts was so low, given the huge opportunity presented by e-commerce, Facebook's CFO, David Ebersman, said: "The focus for right now is trying to figure out what the right product is. We think Gifts - if done well, can be a very natural and positive part of the Facebook experience.
"So, for example, when you're wishing someone a happy birthday, the ability to send a gift along with that and just figuring out how the product needs to work, what the interfaces are, what the selection of products is, how the payment process works, all of that stuff is what we're going to have to optimise to make the product grow as you're asking. And, we're going to try to do that. That'll be something that we work on in 2013."
On the local front, last year a start-up called GoGifting was launched to bring social gifting to SA. The service uses Facebook Connect to connect to users' social graphs and allow for the sending of gift cards via Facebook. At the time of launch, retailers offering gift cards through the service included Edgars, @home, WantItAll.co.za, Kalahari.com, Flowers.co.za, Norman Goodfellows and Mantality.co.za.
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