Facebook Shuts Down Gift Service, Shifts Focus on Other ‘Commerce-related’ Projects

Facebook’s ‘Gift Shop’ initiative wasn’t doing so good these past years. The social network’s Gift Shop that lets you buy and send gifts to friends was originally launched back a few years back, granting you the ability to send virtual goods to your friends.

In 2010, Facebook closed it since it was not doings so good, which is was to be expected since the website was focusing on social media and not e-commerce. Following Karma’s acquisition by the social media giant in September 2012, a physical ‘Gift Shop’ was then re-opened. However, according to a report by Re/Code, Facebook plans on killing this one too on the 12th of August.

Facebook apparently learned its lesson from these past mistakes, having the first attempt at stopping the second Gift Shop initiative in August 2013, when the social media giant partially shut it down, removing the ability to purchase physical goods and focusing on gift cards. However, Facebook appears not to give up on its idea completely, having another ‘job’ for its e-commerce team.

“We’ll be using everything we learned from Gifts to explore new ways to help businesses and developers drive sales on the Web, on mobile and directly on Facebook,” Tera Randall, a Facebook spokeswoman, said in a statement.

The team formed by Karma founder Lee Linden and the rest of the previous Gift Shop team are said to remain within Facebook and work on other ‘commerce-related’ projects.

Thank you Mashable for providing us with this information