

Show HN: GiftsBuffer.com - giftsbuffer

If you know a person only online and not in real life and find that you would like to send a gift to that person, how would you do it. The other person woud not be comfortable giving out his or her home address, telephone no. or a real name.<p>I was stuck in such a situation once, which gave me the idea to come up with http://giftsbuffer.com.<p>GiftsBuffer is a way to send and receive gifts while maintaining your privacy. No need to exchange private details like address, telephone no. or even your real name with real life strangers, to send or receive gifts. GiftsBuffer as the name says, acts as a buffer between the two parties.<p>This service is powered by Amazon.com amazing service, so you can gift from among thousands of products that Amazon.com sells.<p>How it works is that if you want to send a gift to someone, select the gift you want to send and enter the e-mail address or registered username of the person you want to send the gift to. The other person adds his or her home address, telephone no. and real name to the gift. We gather and update the shipping charges and tax information for the gift. You make payment for the gift based on the updated info. After we receive payment confirmation, we place the order for the gift items with Amazon.com. Amazon delivers the gifts to the person you wished to send the gifts to.<p>Neither party will ever know the address, telephone no. or real name of each other ever, thereby enabling a safe way to send and receive gifts online.<p>I am posting this here with hope that the good people at Hacker News would give me their valuable feedback, a little bit of encouragement and lots of constructive criticism. Your thougths on what you think about the idea, the implementation, the design etc would be really invaluable.<p>Looking forward to your opinions ...
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caw
I'm a member of a computer forum, and the forum members there sometimes send
each other stuff as either random acts of kindness or as thank-you's. But
because of the group being in to high end gaming computers, everyone has
Steam, and so most of the gifts end up being Steam gifts of games (sometimes
things are physically mailed, but those are more spare parts exchanges; the
seller doesn't buy anything for that except shipping)

I don't think anyone there would rather go through the hassle of setting up
another account on this website so that someone could send a gift from Amazon.
There's lots of PC games out there, so it's not like the pool of available
items are lame.

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giftsbuffer
Yes there is the hassle of creating accounts with giftsbuffer.com and
Amazon.com, but considering that you can continue to maintain your anonymity,
seems like a minor inconvenience.

Steam is an excellent service, but does Steam work for console(XBox. PS3)
gaming as well?

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caw
_Steam is an excellent service, but does Steam work for console(XBox. PS3)
gaming as well?_

No it doesn't, and I suspect this question was largely rhetorical. My point
stands that my particular experience doesn't care about your product. There
are 3 feelings you can get from a product/service: love, hate, indifference,
and the last one is the worst because they won't tell you how to make it
better.

However, that doesn't mean my comment was entirely worthless. You could go to
a console gaming forum, taking the assumption that people on gaming forums
gift each other items, and see if they like or hate your product.

 _seems like a minor inconvenience_ Perhaps it's not to me, as a potential
customer. Don't fall into a trap of making assumptions for your customer base.

Also, how is this different than an Amazon wish list? Someone else mentioned
blog posts, and some bloggers have Amazon wish lists available that they can
buy things off of.

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giftsbuffer
First of all thank you for your comment. It would really be highly arrogant of
me to consider any comment as worthless. At this stage of the service, any
comment is something to take a lesson from and try to improve the product.

Secondly, I knew from the beginning that service may not be of much use for
gifting PC Games because Steam does a such a superb job of it, but there is
always scope if someone wants to gift someone a physical copy of a game, be it
for Consoles or PC. Anyways, I am sure that not all PC Gamers have a Steam
account.

As for creating a new account to gift someone something, I have taken your
comment under consideration and am trying to incorporate Facebook login, so
that we can at least try to lessen the effort needed to send someone a gift.

We differ to Amazon Wish List in the sense that with our service a person can
choose a gift from among thousands of products Amazon offers, and not be
restricted to a few items a person chooses to add to his wish list. Also
another difference is that, with GiftsBuffer the person receiving the gift
will not know who has sent the gift either. If someone chooses to pay via CC
on Amazon, the senders personal details including name and billing address,
will be clearly communicated to the recipient, at least that is my
understanding.

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giftsbuffer
Clickable: <http://giftsbuffer.com>

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traxtech
Who send gifts to an unknown person ???

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dannytatom
Participants of secret santas, probably.

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caw
This is true. Patio11 has Halloween Bingo Card Creator, so why not
"SecretSanta" themed gift buffer? Nothing says that the recipients of the
gifts can't know each other offline, but the gift giving process is what needs
to be anonymous.

