Online Birthday Gift Registry Use Soars in a Time of COVID


Arden Hills, Minnesota, Aug. 27, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Based on member usage collected from nearly one million signups, Giftster, a free year-round family gift registry service reports wish list sharing for birthdays is up 61% year over year.

While social distancing is not fully responsible for this uptick in usage, we’re seeing a lot of parents trying to keep their family celebrations alive and well in new ways–virtually.

Browsing family wish lists is a fun way to find out what new hobbies and items are of interest to family members that you may have not known about otherwise. And for the kids who haven’t been able to attend their favorite events or school activities–it’s a way for them to dream big simply by creating a wish list.

For parents trying to keep track of gift ideas for their children, using a year-round gift registry leads to less duplicate gifts and time spent coordinating ideas between family members.

Gift-giving events can be a great source of stress and anxiety for some, without adding the state of the world on top of it. Online registries have become a great organizational tool for sharing family wish lists as well as helping choose great gifts for others they'll not only love but will also fit within a budget. In a time of great uncertainty, spending responsibly is high on the lists of many households this year.

Economist Joel Waldfogel from the University of Minnesota calculated that the nervousness and anxiety many people feel around giving and receiving gifts has a good reason…a $14 billion reason.

If you add up the cost from all the disappointed gift recipients, because they got a gift that was the wrong size or wrong color, you actually approach, for the entire United States, a $14 billion dollar loss of value during Christmas alone – the difference between what people pay for gifts and what the recipients value them at.

Giftster continues to hear how families are finding joy in sharing online wish lists. They report less anxiety, less money wasted, and more joy getting exactly what they would have picked out themselves, and really appreciating it.

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About Giftster

Giftster defines the standard for an easy-to-use universal gift registry for family and close friends. Giftster wish lists contain gift ideas from any store in the world, and the Giftster platform includes the website at giftster.com, mobile web for small screen devices at m.giftster.com, and apps for iOS in the App Store and Android devices in Google Play and Amazon App Store.

Giftster is the popular choice for families wishing to simplify Christmas holiday and birthday gift-giving, and for creating baby, wedding and donation registries.

 

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