How GiftGuru works

GiftGuru is the suggestion helper that appears inside an exchange when a wishlist is empty. It proposes concrete products, with a price and a link, based on what it already knows about the exchange.

It is not a general search tool or a catalogue you can open whenever you like: it shows up in exactly the two moments where it is needed.

When it appears

When your own wishlist is empty. On the wishes tab, if you have not added anything yet, GiftGuru offers to fill it for you with the Fill For Me button.

When your giftee's wishlist is empty. On the overview, after the draw, if the person you drew has not added anything, GiftGuru proposes ideas in its place. The notice says so plainly: your giftee did not fill their wishlist, but these items match the exchange details.

As soon as there is at least one product on the relevant wishlist, GiftGuru disappears and the real list is shown. What the person actually asked for always wins.

Where the suggestions come from

From the exchange, not from a profile of you. GiftGuru uses the gift category chosen when it was created, the group type, the budget with its currency, and the exchange's country.

From that it translates the exchange category into store categories and runs the search. This is worth saying clearly because the name misleads: GiftGuru uses artificial intelligence It is a direct category map, which is why it answers fast and gives everyone in the same exchange the same result.

If the exchange has two categories, two searches run and the results are interleaved one by one, so the grid is not filled by just one of them. Duplicate products are then removed. If one of the two searches fails, the other still fills the grid.

Finally the list is ordered giving preference to products with Prime delivery and with ratings.

How it respects the budget

This is the part that generates the most questions, so here it is in detail.

The exchange budget is not treated as a ceiling but as a band, with a ceiling and a floor:

• Ceiling: up to 15% above the budget. A gift of 115 in a 100 exchange still counts as inside.
• Floor: no less than 30% of the budget. A gift of 80 in a 1,000 exchange is not a bargain, it reads as a bad gift.

If there are at least three products inside that band, those are what you see.

If there are fewer than three, the system relaxes the floor first, not the ceiling: it keeps everything under the ceiling and shows up to eight products, starting with the most expensive, which are the ones closest to your budget.

Only if that still does not produce three products does it fall back to the last resort: the eight cheapest available. A weak suggestion beats an empty section.

Two details that explain odd-looking results:

• A product with no known price is always kept. It cannot be shown to be over budget, nor to be too cheap.
• A product priced in a different currency from the budget is treated the same as one with no price, rather than being compared wrongly.

And if the exchange has no usable budget, nothing is filtered at all.

Fill For Me

The Fill For Me button adds five products to your wishlist in one go.

Those five are picked at random from the batch of suggestions. The randomness is deliberate: because the suggestions are the same for the whole exchange, without it every participant would end up with an identical list.

What it adds is yours from that moment on. You can delete any of the five, or add more by hand.

Searching yourself

When GiftGuru appears because your giftee's wishlist is empty, alongside the suggestions you also get a search box. It is there for when you already know what you want to give and the exchange categories do not cover it.

Your search replaces the category-derived keyword, and its results are not cached: it is your query, not a reusable result for the exchange. Back to suggestions returns you to the original proposal.

More suggestions

The More suggestions button moves to the next page of the same batch. It does not launch a new search, so it is instant.

Eight suggestions are shown per page. When you reach the end it starts again from the first page rather than leaving you with an empty grid.

Already bought it

After the draw, if you tap one of the suggestions, you are asked whether you found the gift, with an Already bought it button.

Marking it records that you are done, and stops the question coming back. It is only offered if the draw has already happened and you had not marked it before.

Why it is sometimes slow and sometimes instant

An exchange's suggestions are stored and reused: there is a seven-day cache with a shorter one-hour cache above it. The first person to ask waits for the search; everyone else gets them immediately.

An empty result is never stored. If the search fails at that moment, an empty section does not get pinned for days: the next attempt genuinely tries again.

Worth knowing

• The store products are searched in, and the affiliate tag, both depend on the exchange's country, which comes from the address prefix.
• GiftGuru does not see your history or your personal data. Only the exchange details and, if you search, what you type.
• If you know what you want, your own wishlist always beats a suggestion. GiftGuru exists for when that list is missing.