Elfster: The Secret Santa App

Idk why but something abt this app is fun lol it’s like amazon where you can make wishlists/cart but people can see and buy it for you. I love it especially for holidays or birthdays !!🩷

So we have used Elfster for the last three years for gift exchanges. Most of the time it works out really well. We really like the way it handles gift exchanges, especially the part where you can limit who gets who. It really helps with bigger families and not getting assigned your partner/spouse which is important in these exchanges. However, we had a big problem this year "Mark As Purchased" function. It would show that it was purchased on the individuals and who purchased it, but when we looked at other people's same list, it did not show that it was purchased. Others could not see that it was already purchased. So once again we had duplication of gifting. This is a basic function of this app and really needs to be corrected. Will we use it again next year? That really depends on Elfster and whether they can fix this functionality because that is one of the main reasons we used it.

This app is not easy to navigate. In order to create a wishlist you have to click through a series of things to get to the right place. At times the wishlists have shown up with different sizes for requested items on each of Elfster’s accounts. If you belong to multiple Elfster exchanges you have to be very careful that your wishlists are separate or else you will receive duplicate gifts. In addition, this is not for use with families who have multiple generations as the older generations who are not as tech savvy have a hard time using the app which results in A LOT of extra work for the person who created the Elfster.

I did restrictions of who not to get and I even made a “fake member” who was restricted by everyone but someone still got the member to gift. App needs to work on their restrictions.

Why in the world is there a private only me see list when this is a gift exchange app? Some of the people hadn’t realize that the list had a private only me can see feature. Remove this feature.

One of our participants got two Secret Santa’s and one got none.

Gifts inevitably end up getting duplicated and the wrong size purchased because it must be manually entered and not automatic. The app UI/dashboard is clunky not easy to find relevant / upcoming details. My biggest issue is that when you buy the item you have to go back and mark it as purchased. The wrong sizes and colors have been purchased because it doesn’t automate the correct choices and it’s HARD TO FIND the information. It’s in the tiniest writing under the link. Make the “MARK AS PURCHASED” button BIG AND RED or unmissable and the SIZE AND COLOR PREFERENCES VERY CLEAR!!! So easy to miss those details. Make it more seamless and I’ll be back and write a better review, thank you merry Christmas :)

I have a five siblings who are mostly married so we decided to do a secret Santa a few years among the adults. We have been using Elfster since we started the gift exchange and it has worked well. It is a little clunky when trying to add items to your wishlist that are not on Amazon. I wish the app wasn’t so dependent on Amazon items but otherwise it works well for our family exchange.

I think it deserves 4/5 because its just genuinely cool to wish like this

Love Elfster - we use this all year - birthdays and other occasions too