You know I’m a fan of all things social, so I’m excited to confirm that eBay Inc. has acquired the technology and team behind The Gifts Project, a social commerce platform that powers online group gifting and enables online retailers, marketplaces and gift stores to bring shoppers together through social buying experiences.

At eBay, we currently use The Gifts Project to power eBay Group Gifts, which integrates three of the world’s largest communities – Facebook, eBay, PayPal – to make it super-easy to solve a common problem: finding, organizing, paying for and delivering a gift from many to one – all online.

Going forward, we plan to transition The Gifts Project into eBay’s Israel Social Center, which will focus on building social shopping platforms and product features for eBay Marketplaces.

We talk a lot about how consumers are driving a new retail experience – right now, especially through mobile and the incredible growth we’re seeing in mobile-enabled shopping. Social commerce is a more nascent space, and eBay is working on strategic ways to integrate social networks into our buying and selling experiences.

From AllThingsD:
Besides Group gift buying, eBay has been developing ways to log in to your Facebook account on eBay’s homepage to get product recommendations based on your past purchasing habits. Another feature expected to launch sometime this year is to allow users to post multiple products to their Facebook page to get their friends to vote on which one they should buy.

I’m interested to see how we evolve the eBay Group Gifts experience this year, and how we’ll build out new features that help our customers connect their social graph likes and interests with the amazing selection of inventory on eBay. Our new VP of social commerce, Don Bradford, is leading these efforts and from what I’ve heard, is at the forefront of cool new stuff.

Looking forward to learning more when I get back to HQ… for now, it’s back to eBay: On Location – Orlando.

Cheers!
RBH