He also sees a trend toward e-gift cards or virtual gift cards, which boil the card down to a bar code--no plastic necessary.

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As many consumers get new smartphones, tablets, e-readers and digital content gift certificates for Christmas, they spend Christmas day loading up their devices with new content.

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The giver fills out a form -- and for a fee the company e-mails the recipient a virtual gift certificate.

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Between December 3-10, the Andersen people tried to order some 480 gift items from a range of 100 e-commerce sites, from Amazon.com down.

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E-mail your customer database with specific suggestions about you could meet their gift-giving needs.

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His two-year-old Seattle startup makes software that tracks gift-card balances in real time and blasts e-mails about looming expirations.

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"Make someone the gift of a prayer through text, twitter or e-mail every day, " he said.

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E-readers and tablets (including Amazon's Kindle Fire e-reader, which is a modified Android tablet) were a popular holiday gift item last year.

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As I have written, this gift-giving service is a move by Facebook into the e-commerce market, and likely a sign of more e-commerce moves to come.

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What makes her happier is when she gets an e-mail from a racing fan like the man who wrote her to tell her about the gift her bought his wife.

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Gift cards, in short, are a fundamentally bricks-and-mortar focused business in an e-tailing world.

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