Gift Card Feature for an Online Marketplace: Sender and Recipient Journeys
Company: Swiggy
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
An online shopping platform wants its customers to be able to buy gift cards and send them to friends and family. How would you design and build this feature? Explain why the platform wants it, who sends and who receives gift cards, what the experience looks like for each of them, what you would launch first, and how you would judge success.
```hint Two users per gift
Every gift card has a buyer who pays and a recipient who redeems, and the recipient may not have an account yet. Map both journeys before you pick features.
```
### Clarifying Questions
- What does the platform sell: a broad marketplace, food delivery, travel bookings or something else? The gifting occasions and the card design depend on it.
- Should the cards work only on this platform, or also with partner brands?
- Is there a business goal behind the request, such as bringing in new customers through recipients or capturing more spending around gifting occasions?
- Which countries does the platform operate in? Gift cards are regulated as stored value in many places.
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear business goal for gift cards and how it shapes the design
- Segments of senders (individual gifters, companies buying in bulk) and recipients (existing customers and newcomers), with a reasoned focus
- Both journeys end to end: purchase, personalization, delivery, claiming, balances, partial use and refunds
- A sequenced launch scope, and metrics covering purchases, redemption, recipient conversion and fraud
- Gift-card-specific risks: payment fraud and scams, expiry and stored-value rules, and how unredeemed balances are treated
### Follow-up Questions
- Fraudsters start buying gift cards with stolen credit cards. How do you detect and stop them without blocking real gifters?
- A company asks to buy gift cards in bulk for its employees. What changes in the product and in operations?
- Six months after launch, most cards are redeemed but few recipients place a second order. What would you change?
Overview: A product design question about letting shoppers on an e-commerce platform buy digital gift cards and send them to friends and family. It tests setting a business goal, designing both the sender and recipient journeys, sequencing a launch, and handling fraud, expiry rules and metrics such as redemption and recipient conversion.