Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Stone, CEO of CashStar (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What about returns? In the previous use case, you said you were in a Gap, saw a pink sweater, and decided to give that as a gift to a friend. Let’s say the friend receives that pink sweater and decides she wants a different color. How is that handled in your system?

David Stone: If you were in the Gap and you wanted to give a pink sweater, but they had only red or you couldn’t find what you wanted, you would pull up the mobile gift website and send [your friend] an instant e-gift card from your mobile phone. So, she could buy whatever she wanted instead of its being out of stock or your being out of luck.

SM: I see. So, what’s happening here is there’s no merchandise-specific gift giving, it’s basically just a gift card.

DS: Primarily, but it can be done in so many forms that you can make it personal. You can choose an image of the product you want. As entrepreneurs, we think it’s a lot better because 30% of gifts are never used or are returned. We think this is a much better way.

SM: That’s kind of what I’m probing. The return issue is significant in gift giving. And most of the types of merchants that you’re talking about, Williams Sonoma and so forth, have specific gift return or gift exchange policies. How does that translate in the digital realm?

DS: We do have merchants or retailers that you allow you to return an item and get a gift card. We do have some of that. We haven’t exploited it as much as we probably should because we’re growing so much. Certainly Amazon is doing that now, probably better than most.

SM: Okay. Let’s talk about social and trace what’s happening in the social world. What is the future of gifting in the social world?

DS: One of the insights I have is that a lot of what’s gone on in the social world has been transactional. A lot of the retailers and other companies are trying to promote their products and get you to engage and buy more products. Our belief is the social world is much more about relationships, connections, and experiences and not about transactions. There are about 80 million birthday posts a day on Facebook, and we’ve enabled our retailers – probably about 25 of them now – so that a consumer can post a gift to a Facebook wall. So, if you can imagine for a minute – and this is real – that you want to give someone a Gap or Starbucks card, it can be posted to his wall. You know, you’re sitting in your office or you’re coming home from work and you’re on your phone, and you open up your Facebook page, and suddenly you see that gift to make you really feel good and special in a digital relational context. Nobody’s trying to sell you anything. You’re just getting that gift. It’s just a great experience.

SM: Where does go from here?

DS: Where does the digital gifting from here?

SM: Yes. I think your vision and use cases on the mobile side are real and concrete. What about the leverage on the social side? As you said, it’s more relationship oriented, so how does that get taken advantage of as we go along?

DS: Well, stay tuned. There are a lot of companies experimenting. None of them are particularly good in our view. So, stay tuned. I can’t say much more, but there’s innovation happening here from some of our young, bright product engineer people who are in their early 20s and live in that world. We’re thinking very hard about it. We’re innovating. We’re testing. We’re trying to work with retailers. Starbucks has 25 million or 26 million Facebook fans, twice as many as anybody else. It’s an interesting experiment. We’ve talked to them about sending your friend a cup of coffee. We hope something like that will occur in the future. We’re also looking at building our own consumer-oriented social gift giving application. I can’t say more than that.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Stone, CEO of CashStar
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