Weekend Website
Black Friday has already come and gone which means that it’s officially shopping season. Some of you have already spent some time trying to figure out what to buy friends and family which can be one of the most difficult tasks this time of year. Wouldn’t it be nice if you just had to look at a list online to see what everybody wanted? A fairly new site called Gifticus aims to make the whole gift-giving process a bit easier.
What is Gifticus?
Gifticus is a startup which will allow users to set up gift lists and share it with friends and family. This is great for any occasion where someone would be receiving or giving gifts like birthdays, Christmas, and other holidays. They also incorporate a social aspect to the site which we’ll explain in just a minute.
On the Gifticus website, they describe themselves as:
Gifticus is the convenient, easy to use website that allows you to set up a gift list and share it with your friends. We make things as simple as possible – just create an account, login and begin your experience. No widgets to download, no waiting for fancy graphics to load next to each gift, just decide what you want and add it to your list. What could be simpler?
Getting Started
To get started using Gifticus, you’ll need to create an account. It’s the usual sign-up process and will allow you to keep a saved list of gifts that you can access and edit whenever you’d like. When you want to add a new gift to your list, you’ll just click “enter a new gift. Then you’ll enter in the name of the gift, a brief description, a link if there is one, the price range that it falls under, and the “priority” of the gift (low, average, high). I like how there’s the option to enter the price range so that if someone knows they want to spend a certain amount, they can look for an appropriate item.
The Social Side
Because it’s all about letting people know what gifts you’d like but also to see what other people want, there’s a social side to it. You can create a friends list, and invite people to use the service. The more people you get using the service, the more useful it will be.
The Good, Bad, and Ugly
We’ll start with the good first. One thing I like about Gifticus is simply the idea behind it. Many people around the world will be buying gifts for someone within the next month. It’s always hard to know what to buy for someone which is why Gifticus could potentially be helpful.
Next, the bad. Searching for friends really isn’t very practical because you search for them by their first and last name. It would be much easier if they offered the option to search for friends via an email address. Another potential “bad” element is the fact that it’s so new and not many people know about it or use it. This is one of those services that’s only useful if people actually use it.
One thing that could be viewed as good or ugly is the design. It’s simple and clean which could be good, but it almost feels as though it’s missing a design element like a real logo. At first glance, their logo looks like it’s just Comic Sans font in bold which doesn’t give them any type of branding. It’s simple, but there’s not much to it.
Wrapping it up…
Is it the best site I’ve ever visited, no, but it’s still a site that some of you may find useful if you’re able to get a majority of your friends and family using it. There’s always room for improvement, and I think there’s a lot that Gifticus could do to make the service even better. Instead of keeping wish lists all around the web for the different places you’re wanting something (some sites will let you create a “wish list” for their site), try Gifticus to get them all condensed into one, it just might make your holidays a little less stressful.
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Tags: CyberNotes, Web Sites
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Check out this alternative:
[boxedup.com]
It looks way better and has a boatload of additional features (well, at least it feels like that).
I was disappointed that “Gifticus” is only available for accounts opened in the United States. It would be great if it would be open to other countries as well. I know a lot of people who buy merchandise from the U.S. online, plus many persons travel to the U.S. to buy things not available on their own countries.
This would enrich the list of gifts people like on a global basis. It’s a great idea and I hope it catches on to mainstream buyers.
I still like just surfing the open web with Google Notebook open.
Wow, boxedup is definitely a step-up from Gifticus. Thanks for pointing it out!
I didn’t realize it was only available to those in the U.S. Sorry about that!
I’ve been searching for ages to find a good online wishlist app for our family. Didn’t find Gifticus, but I did find boxedup.com. They’ve changed the site a lot since it was named gifttagging.com and it does look promising but unfortunately it misses a few key features. It’s not possible to “reserve” a gift for instance, so that other people who watch the list don’t buy the same thing you are buying.
Most of the others were ugly, not user-friendly or too commercial, but the one I could settle on was wishpot.com. I’d recommend checking it out if you’re looking for a wishlist site which can support groups – if only for comparison. It’s not perfect either, but it’s the only one that more or less offered what we needed.
Wow, Wishpot has a really good interface. Nice find!
Hi!
This is Chris from boxedup.com here.
Thanks to Pieter for picking us up in the initial comment.
Just to correct Change it is possible to reserve things on boxedup (you have to be somebody’s friend to do this). And if you don’t want to know if something’s been reserved on your list then there’s a setting that allows this to be hidden from the list owner (but everybody else who visits can see if something’s reserved or not).
Thanks!
Chris
boxedup.com
Thanks for the correction Chris. It is possible to mark items as reserved indeed, *but* you cannot keep it a surprise to the person who has the wish list. This way you can see which gifts you will receive for your birthday/xmas/etc, which takes a big part of the fun away if you ask me. Yes, you can change that setting, but it’s your choice and default settings are probably rarely changed.
Wishpot hides it to anyone but your friends and gives the *buyer* the option to hide it from the person who owns the list (and it’s hidden by default). Much better if you ask me, although a combination of the two (your idea and wishpot’s) might work even better.
What could make it even better than that, in my opinion, is if there would be a possibility to be reminded of items on your list marked as reserved for more than x amount of time, like “2 items on your list have been marked as reserved for x weeks by friend y. Would you like to unreserve them or send your friend a reminder?”, so that items don’t stay reserved forever causing nobody to ever give that nice item to you
Anyway, great looking site nevertheless, I’m sure you’re working on improving it all the time.
Hey there.. I’m from Wishpot and I’m glad to hear that you like the site. If you have any questions or comments feel free to send me an email. christine@wishpot.com
We aim to give our users the best Wishpot experience possible!
I’d also like to invite you to check out [wishlisting.com] (sorry for the shameless plug!) Our reservation model is similar to what you all are describing, where the gifts are kept hidden from the recipient. One twist we add is the ability for the gift purchaser to choose when (or if) the recipient gets to find out about the reservation.
I’ve had that feature come in handy when I mailed a gift but it wasn’t going to arrive in time. The recipient got a notification about it on their birthday, even though it didn’t show up until a few days later.
Nice site Tom, though it’s quite buggy here (can’t create account and more in Firefox 3, login box still visible after logging in) and slow to load. You also seem to need quite a huge monitor: everything’s really big and taking a lot of space. Interface is really attractive though and the features seem really nice as well