We’re being acquired by GiftCards.com!
The press release:
GiftCards.com, the highest ranking and most trafficked gift card website on the Internet, agrees to acquire Giftly, a two-year old startup that enables consumers to buy and deliver digital gifts via its website and free app.
Pittsburgh, PA. May 22, 2013 – GiftCards.com™, the leading website for gift cards, today agreed to acquire Giftly, the leading mobile gifting app, to build a digital and mobile commerce platform in the $110 billion gift card industry.
Founded in 1999, GiftCards.com commands strong positions in both the plastic and digital gift card spaces. With long-standing bank relationships and as a certified issuer of all three major payment networks, the company prints on-demand custom gift-cards in its own facility. As the number one gift cards website in traffic and leading organic searches on all things gift cards, it offers the widest range of products: personalized, pre-designed, virtual, local, group, and discount gift cards. It has 3 industry-related patents issued and another 38 pending for game-changing business concepts.
Giftly, a two-year old startup based in San Francisco, enables consumers to buy and deliver digital gifts via its website and free app. Giftly has pioneered a new platform for gift cards which sends gift credits to recipients when they redeem a gift, rather than issuing plastic cards, and requires no point of sale integration.
“Digital and mobile gifting is the future of the industry and we have invested heavily in patenting technologies in this space” stated, Jason Wolfe, CEO of GiftCards.com. “The Giftly acquisition is a logical and exciting step into building the industry’s future with an established partner in the fast-growing m-commerce space.” CEB estimates that 85% of US consumers exchanged gift cards in 2012 and projects electronic gifting will grow to $15 billion by 2015.
Giftly will be rolled into the GiftCards.com operation but will maintain its offices in San Francisco. “This is an exciting opportunity for Giftly,” commented CEO Timothy Bentley, “by partnering with GiftCards.com, we can combine the strengths of a traditional gift card player with the innovative platform that Giftly has developed.”
GiftCards.com is talking to a number of venture firms and strategic investors to raise its first round of funding to accelerate the combined companies’ growth.
Buy now, deliver later!
Now you have the option to deliver your Giftly at a later date.
When you buy a Giftly through the app or the web site, you can set a delivery date in the future and we’ll deliver the Giftly that morning.
Deliver Later to:
• Ensure you don’t forget to send a gift on the right day.
• Get your holiday gifting done early.
• Make sure their Giftly is received at the perfect moment.
Introducing the Printable Giftly
We just added the option to print out a Giftly from the Giftly website, so that you can deliver a Giftly to a recipient personally.
Print out a Giftly to:
• Hand to the host of a holiday party
• Stuff in a stocking or tuck into a card
• See the look of joy on the recipient’s face
To compliment the Giftly, we also designed a matching envelope that you can use.
After you choose the printable option on the Delivery Options page and checkout, you’ll receive a email with the Giftly and envelope attached. A few minutes with a scissors later and you’ll be all set to deliver that Giftly in real life!
Giftlys IRL: what will we think of next!
Redesigned Giftly website
The Giftly Team is pleased to announce the launch of our redesigned website, which uses the new look and feel that we developed for mobile.
Giftly is a product that must bridge the desktop and mobile platforms for the simple reason that many, many gifts are purchased and received online but the vast majority are used on the mobile device.
We’ll be fleshing out the site over the next few months as we continue to build useful tools to help make giving great gifts even easier, but this is a first step.
Why people don’t give plastic gift cards
According to this article, “Two-thirds of affluent American women want gift cards. But less than a fifth of men will give it to them.”
That doesn’t surprise us at Giftly because plastic gift cards aren’t personal and don’t feel good to give, so why would you give that to a woman you care about…even if that’s what she wants.
When we started Giftly, we started it with a simple premise: make a gift card that people could love. We wanted to make a gift card that felt personal and contained the type of character you want in a gift. So we re-invented the gift card, from beginning to end.
People like receiving gift cards because then they can pick out something they want and they can avoid getting something they don’t want. We’ve made a gift card that does all that and also feels nice to give because it can be fully customized and made specifically for the person you’re giving the gift to.
You can make a Giftly for the person’s favorite restaurant, or a boutique you know they love, or for something that you know they love to do. You can give them the gift of travel, or a babysitter, or a bottle of wine. Great gifts that they will love and that you can feel good about giving.
