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11 Comments

Automated gifting?

Hey IndieHackers,

I'm looking for feedback my idea: Threlle

In particular I'm not sure if it should be B2B or B2C.

Would you use this?

Idea inspiration
I'm a warehouse manager by day, and during holiday season we needed gift cards to give our employees.

This involved me running around to multiple CVS and Walgreens stores only to find out CVS has a daily limit to how much you can spend on GC's.

The whole process took a few hours and was an extreme hassle.

This product would help mitigate that.

Any feedback would be appreciated 🙌

on June 6, 2019
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      Leaning that way as well. What's your reasoning?

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        Companies would like to reward employees and are pressed for time making a good fit.

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    I like it. 5% fee on GCs over $20 does seem excessive. I'd also think that it'd be fair for me to get a break on the fees if I'm sending more gift cards, because that way you can incent the same number of customers to spend more with you. Just my 2 cents.

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      Good points. Definitely willing to lower that percentage. For now I'm using stripe, so there's a processing fee of 2.9% I need to work around.

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        ah yes, the payment processing fees... have you looked into something like "pay with amazon", to see if there's a way to avoid/reduce those? From the customer's perspective, if I buy GCs directly on Amazon, they eat the processing fees, but it costs me time to do the transaction, send the card etc. I guess it comes down to how valuable my time is, and whether your services saves me enough time to justify me paying the fees... hmmm

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          Amazon Pay sounds interesting. I'll have to look into that. It's your point about time saved justifying the cost that makes me wounder of I should be targeting companies over individuals 🤔 not sure

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    From your site I think you only do amazon gift card. But if you are willing to make it any gift (reasonable stuff), then i'd say B2B would work better because of two reasons:

    • Automation is especially useful when a high volume is required. As an individual, I do not need or have to send many gifts to people. So, it's not really a big issue for me. As a business, if there is a need to send lot's of gifts, then automation would be ideal
    • Growing trends in awarding customers. Most apps, especially B2C ones, at least in India, are now giving so many "awards" to their users. Awards here are in terms of actual cash, or discounts. But I bet, users would love more to get a different form of award - an actual gift may be much better! I know, logically that makes little sense since I could just buy whatever I want with the award cash, but it's all about emotions here! A gift has a much higher sentiment value than just cash. So, you could position yourself as a service that enables businesses to easily send gifts to their customers as a reward.
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    have you had many signup

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    Is this kind of like Buffer but for Gift cards?
    You can just put your gift cards sending on to a schedule and we'll automate it for you

    I just purchased a gift card online for a channel partner and my challenge is the limited selection that works digitally.

    Also, my first thought about Threlle is whether it'd get stale quickly receiving the same gift card every month/quarter/year (I know you'd probably introduce other merchants).

    But the value I see is the timeliness aspect that I didn't miss out on the moment when I want to show my appreciation and also the opportunity to personalize it.

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    This is a very interesting idea. When I read the headline I thought of something different.

    A service that you could input friends and family that you would want to remember to buy presents for on certain holidays and birthdays. It would remind you and recommend gifts based on a personality profile. Could be a nice way to earn amazon affiliate revenue.