While e-commerce was on the rise before the pandemic, the massive shift to digital supercharged the online shopping industry — bringing entirely new categories of products (and shoppers) to the web. According to Adobe, Americans have spent a record $1.7 trillion online over the last two years, a 55% uptick from two years before the pandemic. A fair number of those online purchases are gifts as revealed by search trends — from 2019 to 2020, there was an 80% increase in searches for “online gifting” on Google Search. But despite the fact that hundreds of billions of people now regularly turn to digital channels (e.g. Amazon) to gift, the gifting experience remains subpar. That’s the opinion of Alex Ingram, at least, who co-founded a startup — Zest — that’s focused on e-commerce gifting flows

Three years ago, Ben and Nicole Green were planning their wedding and decided to go digital with registries to save on money and materials. But when it came time to gift others, while they preferred going the digital route — as they did with their wedding — they found that digital gifting platforms on the web didn’t meet their criterion. “We noticed there was no platform we would actually want to use,” Nicole Green told TechCrunch in an email interview. “In combination, I recognized there was a gap in the market for a more genuine and authentic way for people to connect and celebrate one another in the digital age.”