Problem
The idea of Wedding/Baby showers is great until you realize that most of the gifts bought on registries are on the cheaper side.
Why is that and how can we fix it?
What I realized is that conventional gift-giving normally has the following rules:
- stay within a certain spending limit
- it's OK to go over the spending limit for a family member
- contribute and buy an expensive gift with friends.
These assumptions were my foundation for the "chip-in" feature project that I have worked on. I chose Amazon’s platform as a test ground for my MVP.
Competitive analysis
The custom of contributing for gifts has existed forever, and this by itself is a strong competition. One pitfall to it is that in order to contribute, you have to know who else is also contributing. An online version removes the requirement for people to know each other, this way the number of contributors potentially increases.
The choice of Amazon was easy:
- selection of product categories makes it easy to use for all kinds of gift registries,
- there are no service fees, and
- Amazon gift registries are used rarely (per my findings) which, I believe, makes Amazon more open to find it's niche.