Electronic wishlists and gift certificates are better than their physical equivalents because they can be transmitted instantantly. Thus, e-certificates are the only gift that last-minute shoppers can buy and have delivered right away. A fact you should promote prominently on your homepage for all major gift-giving holidays.

Even better, gift certificates are the ultimate in viral marketing because they are highly targeted and the recipient is highly motivated to use them. When you get a gift certificate to an e-commerce site, you’re going visit it and shop there. And, when your favorite niece tells you that her wishlist is on a certain e-commerce site, you’re quite likely to go there and solve the mystery of what the 20-year-old wants.

If you’re running a B2C site without wishlists and gift certificates, you’re leaving millions on the table.

From a marketing perspective, wishlists and gift certificates are wonderful because they introduce your site to new customers. Unfortunately, this exact advantage turns into a tremendous challenge for website usability.

First-time customers are also first-time users, and they won’t know how to operate your site. They might not even know your brand. They arrive at your site because somebody else likes to shop there. The smallest glitch in the user experience can be fatal for these users. We frequently saw our gift-giving or gift-receiving users stumble because of classic problems that are well-documented in traditional e-commerce usability guidelines. So, the first recommendation for wishlists and gift certificates is simply to have great e-commerce usability.

Gift-related shopping often puts greater emphasis on established e-commerce guidelines or alters their interpretation. For example, it’s always been a guideline to disclose shipping & handling, sales taxes, and any other charges before you ask users for personal information. When shopping with a gift certificate, this guideline is more important than ever because users might feel constrained by the certificate’s monetary value. (While it’s true that people often spend more than the certificate amount, they won’t do this if they feel suckered by a site’s bait-and-switch approach.)

Email as Gift-Giving Medium
For wishlists and gift certificates, achieving highly polished website usability is a must. Beyond that, however, both offerings are often communicated through email, which is a highly brittle medium. The inbox is a harsh environment for commercial communications. Users often assume that legitimate messages are spam, and they also ignore other messages when they’re pressed for time (which is often).

With e-certificates, 30% were summarily junked by our test participants, and a further 20% were not trusted to be what they claimed. Overall, half of the gift-certificate email suffered from disastrous usability.

These days, phishing attacks are so common that it’s not sufficient to send people an email that simply announces, “We have $100 for you.” You need to add several trust markers to the parts of the email that users see in their initial inbox view. You must pay careful attention to the design guidelines for: subject lines, the “from” field, and the information that might appear in the recipient’s e-mail preview area.

Wishlists and gift certificates leverage the strengths of the online medium, introduce new customers to your brand, and capture significant additional revenue streams. Given all these benefits, there should be an easy ROI argument for the changes required to establish a satisfactory user experience for such features.