After more than two years of operation in the local market, electronic gifting platform Giftme wants to further deepen its reach as it add more services and help Jamaicans to unwrap new offerings.

The company founded in May 2021 by CEO Rushio Billings was established to help brick & mortar merchants increase sales through the sale of digital gift cards in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic which stalled movements globally. Billings, on noticing the rise of similar services in the overseas markets while on vacation in other countries, jumped into action to catapult the service locally.

Motivated by the need to reduce the world’s carbon footprint, the company in offering gift cards digitally also aimed to scale down the traditional use of physical plastic gift cards that poison the environment, replacing it with more eco-friendly, cleaner and greener options.

Taking advantage of the gaps he found in the local gift card market, Billings with the assistance of co-founders and chief operating officers Rashidi Thomas and Rojay Simpson has since then sought to pioneer and bring to market a new digital product, which, much to the delight and acceptance of locals, who have constantly demanded greater convenience, continues to carve out a place for its business, more so as the take-up of its services expand.

“Giftme is a platform for brick and mortar small and medium-sized enterprises [SMEs] that allows them to easily acquire, retain and upsell their customers through digital channels. Our platform allows businesses to create branded gift card websites, easily keep track of their customer base while providing more convenient ways for shoppers to utilise various gift options offered by different merchants,” the company’s website in a detailed overview of its operation stated.

“Through our three main distribution channels across retail, corporate and diaspora, we remotely service a growing network of clients ably supported by eleven full time employees,” Chief Operating Officer (COO) Thomas further shared with the Jamaica Observer.

Describing the early days of start-up as one filled with trial and errors, Thomas, in noting that the team never once thought about giving up, said they instead used the opportunity to find market fit products, onboard new merchants while they worked to build awareness and credibility with a targeted audience.

“To date the company, despite a number of challenges, has been able to sell over 150,000 gift cards, having onboarded approximately 285 merchants and 265 corporate clients,” he said.

In citing its registration process as quick and easy, the company also indicated that by just creating an account followed by the set-up of a digital gift store, cards can be immediately redeemed from a growing list of merchants spread across food, beauty and a number of other educational, home and office supplies and services. From the generation of analytics reports, companies are also able to track orders through a unique dashboard available on the platform.

With merchants spread across all parishes, the e-gifting company, on recently signing a distribution partnership agreement with Ding, a multinational, billion-dollar top-up platform, also aims to tap into a much larger customer base — gaining access to more than 100,000 persons in the fast-growing Diaspora market. This, as it helps the globally powerful group in a more targeted and strategic way to support family and friends back home with essential goods and services through purposeful giving. In leveraging this partnership the digital company also wants to revolutionise the existing remittance methods.

Collaborating with popular entities such as Fontana, Jamaica Public Service (JPS), National Water Commission and food delivery service 7Krave, the partnership seeks to help locals in redeeming gift cards offered as payment for important goods and services spanning food, medicine and utilities from members of the diaspora,

“With the partnership still fairly new at just over three months old, our projection is to have about 30-40 per cent of our revenues coming from the diaspora market,” Thomas had indicated to this newspaper a few weeks ago.

The e-gifter in targeting mainly SMEs said it wants to help players in this very vulnerable segment to grow revenues and to significantly increase their customer base.

“Our gift card and loyalty solutions enables them to build meaningful connections with customers, keeping them engaged while rewarding them for shopping. With our loyalty gift card software, we make it easier for these companies to maximise customer retention. This, as we help them to identify slipping customers, providing them with that extra nudge that they need to stay loyal,” the company said.

“We are also working on building more merchant tools to help these businesses increase customer acquisition engagement and retention,” Thomas added.

The COO, in further noting plans for the next phase of growth for the company, said that aside from its larger plan for regional expansion, the business is also now looking to have a much deeper penetration of the market locally.

“The outlook for growth is very promising as we believe there is much more we can accomplish locally. We have aspirations to scale regionally as we later expand into other territories across the Caribbean,” he stated, citing another upcoming plan which sees the release of a new mobile app.

“This will allow our customers to enjoy a much better experience, more discounts among a host of other things. We were working to have this ready this month but due to some hold-ups we have had to push it back to November,” Thomas said.