Facebook stops selling ‘gifts’, to push ‘buy’ button for businesses

Facebook will stop selling gift cards for popular brands such as Starbucks through its ‘gifts’ page and instead focus on new initiatives to help other businesses sell their wares, according to TechCrunch. 

One of these initiatives is Facebook’s new ‘buy’ button, designed to drive sales from business’ ads and posts.

No layoffs will occur, according to TechCrunch, with most of the ‘gifts’ team already reassigned to work on other commerce projects, which include an auto-fill billing platform for shopping apps and a custom audiences initiative that lets brick-and-mortar merchants retarget Facebook ads to existing customers, as well as the ‘buy’ button.

“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,” said Facebook in a statement.

Facebook told TechCrunch it has so much data on who people are, what they care about, and what they buy, that it has plenty of other ways to inject itself into commerce than gift cards.

It’s believed the buy button and other projects will make Facebook significantly more revenue than it had with its gifts.

Facebook launched its ‘gifts’ page in September 2012. It provided the ability for users to send physical gifts to one another, such as chocolates and teddy bears.

When the physical gifts didn’t fare so well with users, Facebook changed its offering to just gift cards in August 2013.

The ‘gifts’ page will stop functioning on August 12.