Heworth-based gift website piggsy.com integrates into social media (From York Press)

Heworth-based gift website piggsy.com integrates into social media

3:02pm Tuesday 7th September 2010 in

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HEWORTH-based web entrepreneurs husband and wife Jason and Julie Wilcox have set up a gift website which integrates into social media.

Piggsy.com, which stands for Personalised Internet Great Gift System, links to users’ Facebook accounts to record their friends’ birthdays and personal interests to send email alerts and gift ideas in time for their birthdays and other important events.

The website, which is free for users, makes its money from affiliate sponsorship of the brands which sell gifts through the site. It has already signed up some big names, including John Lewis, Hamleys and Links of London.

Jason Wilcox said he had the idea for Piggsy about ten years ago, but the technology was too expensive to make it viable.

Julie set up her business, ElegantlyEntertaining.co.uk, which sells accessories for events, such as weddings and Christmas parties, about 18 months ago and Jason discussed the idea with Andie Miller, founder of creative agency A J New Media, which designed his wife’s e-commerce site.

“Andie got back in touch with me to say they’ve got a new piece of kit which allowed a lot of functionality to be tied together in one place and cut the cost of doing it, which made it viable to give it a go,” said Jason.

“Even before halfway through phase one, which was building the website, we were talking about phase two, which includes iPhone apps and SMS messaging. We’ve got a number of different things up our sleeves,” he said.

Andie Miller said the infrastructure behind the database gives it an enormous capacity to grow. “It runs off a massive database, so it could be huge.”