Amazon challenges Facebook Gifts with its own social gifting service

Ecommerce titan Amazon has launched Amazon Birthday Gift, a new service that lets you and your friends chip in to give Facebook connections Amazon gift cards.

Amazon gift cards are popular for birthdays and holidays because they let people buy from Amazon’s humongous selection of stuff. It’s certainly more broad than giving someone a gift using a service like Facebook Gifts, which lets you send friends items like Target gift cards, Starbucks cards, coffee mugs, and more.

But perhaps the best part of Amazon Birthday Gift is that you can essentially “crowdfund” someone’s present. The app lets you and your friends put in money for the Amazon gift card. You can start collecting cash early for the gift card online, and it will not appear on the person’s Facebook Timeline until his or her birthday.

“Birthdays have always been social occasions, and sites like Facebook now make it possible for anyone around the world to send birthday wishes to friends – with Amazon Birthday Gift, those many individual messages can become a big gift,” Steve Shure, Amazon VP of traffic, said in a statement. “Whether it’s your best friend or your old high school teammate, Amazon Birthday Gift lets you join a social gift that will grow as more friends participate, which makes giving and receiving birthday messages on Facebook even more fun.”

Check out the video below for more on how it works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOhGuuLplYw

Screenshot via Amazon/YouTube