How Technology Has Changed Christmas Gift Giving

Featured article by Rick DelGado, Independent Technology Author

Gift-giving has long been one of the most stressful parts of the holiday season. You need to figure out what everyone in your life wants, because it’s never fun to buy someone a gift that you can tell they don’t like. If you don’t get to the mall weeks in advance, you’ll be fighting crowds the whole time you’re there.

Technology has brought plenty of changes to people’s lives, and it has definitely improved the Christmas gift-giving process by leaps and bounds. Here are the most significant ways technology has altered how you buy Christmas gifts.

You Can Buy Everything Online

Online shopping has many benefits no matter the time of year, but it’s during the holidays when being able to buy just about anything you want online is a huge plus. You can save a significant amount of money, because online retailers tend to have the best deals and you’re able to compare prices from many different stores.

Best of all, you can purchase gifts without setting foot in a store, which means you avoid the stress of those big holiday crowds. You get to shop from the comfort of your home, and if you’re buying a gift for someone who lives far away from you, you can also have the gift wrapped and shipped to them.

Great Gift Ideas Are Everywhere

Sometimes you can find the perfect gift for a person right away, but then there are also those dreaded people who are hard to shop for. It’s frustrating to try to figure out what to buy someone, especially when you brainstorm for an hour only to come up with nothing.

With all the information that’s available online, it has become much easier to pick out good gifts for everyone on your list. Most major online retailers offer gift suggestions to help you find items for the people in your life. You can also check out popular blogs with gift suggestions.

Digital Gifts Are In

Gifts don’t need to be something you can wrap anymore. Digital gifts are a popular choice that are ideal if you’re shopping at the last minute and need something that can arrive on time. Just enter the recipient’s email address or social media info, and you can have a gift code or another type of gift sent to them immediately.

Another benefit of digital gifts is the massive selection. If you’ve got a music lover in the family, you could send them an iTunes gift code. For movie aficionados, you could pay for a few months of a Netflix subscription. If a younger member of the family is into computers, you could buy them an online web development course that they can go through at their own pace. The possibilities are almost endless.

Social Media Helps You Learn What a Person Likes

People publish more information about themselves than ever before. This makes it much easier to come up with gift ideas simply by checking out a person’s social media profiles. Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest can all serve as windows into a person’s life, and you can use what you find to help figure out what to give them.

Just about every social network can show you where a person’s interests lie. All you need to do is find the networks that the person uses most. This works especially well for younger members of your family that you may not know that well.

Although people may have their reservations about technology, it can improve your life in many ways. From a convenience perspective, there’s no better way to shop for Christmas gifts than to take advantage of technology and do the bulk of it online. You can pinpoint great gift ideas and get the best prices on all of them in just one afternoon.