Just in the gift of time

• Regional expansion plans to take business to Singapore in 2018

• Aims to be the one-stop shop for all gifting needs in Malaysia

SOMETIMES you just need to get a quick gift for a loved one on the day of an important anniversary or celebration but don’t have the time to get it yourself. It is in those situations that Giftr co-founder and chief executive officer Ang Kok Seong hopes his platform will be your saving grace.

Launched in Jan 2017, Giftr is described as an online gifting marketplace that sells all sorts of items for every occasion from birthdays, anniversaries to festive occasions like Chinese New Year and Christmas.

Items sold range from bouquets of flowers, cakes, balloons and other personalised presents. Giftr doesn’t just sell gifts but it also helps them keep track of important events by using Chatbot for Facebook Messenger as well as provide recommendations for gifts.

Ang has high hopes for Giftr. He intends to make Giftr the ‘Lazada for gifts’. He explains that many merchants and sellers of gifting products tend to be social media sellers that sell via Facebook or Instagram.

In many cases, a merchant could sell a unique product that you won’t be able to buy from a physical retail store like a unicorn cake or customised His-and-Her shirts. Often times the process is not seamless as customers need to communicate via Direct Messages with the merchant before banking the payment to them.

Focusing on offering a seamless gifting experience is part of the mission and over the course of one year in operations, Ang shares that the platform has already carried over 1,700 products from over 100 gift sellers.

According to Ang, Giftr’s customer base has been growing steadily by 25% month-by-month with an average basket size valued at US$31.45 (RM125).

Giftr isn’t Ang’s first venture in the entrepreneur space as he started up another service called Helpr, a chat-based personal concierge service back in 2015. Giftr came about as Ang decided to tweak the business model to focus on gifting as it was a category that they would receive frequent requests.

“We identified that the gifting space is one area traditional big e-commerce players are not tapping into. This is because gifting primarily involves same day door-to-door delivery. For example, for cakes you can’t expect an express courier service provider to do deliveries,” Ang explains.

“Basically we are an additional sales channel for these online merchants in the gifting space. While some already have their own dedicated websites but we help them in traffic acquisition.”

Though Giftr is not quite a household brand name yet, Ang seems confident that the platform has what it takes to gain more traction and is even planning to expand his operations to Singapore in 2018 with a soft launch happening sometime during the year.

Related Stories:

Tableapp launches premium dining pass

Gobi Partners leads a RM4 million Pre-Series A Investment in Zoom

A pivot for the better