How elvish.gifts works: our research method

It starts with the brief

You describe who you’re shopping for — your relationship to them, the occasion, their interests, and anything they’d rather not receive. Then come the two hard inputs, asked directly and never inferred: your budget (a ceiling in dollars) and your deadline (the date the gift must arrive by). Everything else the agent works out from that brief. Recipient profiles are saved in your browser only — nothing you enter is published, and there’s no public list anyone can browse.

Where the suggestions come from

• Your brief — the homepage shortlist is generated from the details you enter: gift ideas matched to the relationship, occasion, and interests you describe. Anything on your avoid list is left out of the picks — if the obvious match for an interest is something they’d rather not receive, we skip it and say so in the reason.
• Live web search — in the concierge chat, the agent can search the live web and is instructed to run one to three targeted searches before recommending gifts, so its suggestions are grounded in real, currently available products at current prices — plus reviews and recent gift guides. When it leans on a source, it cites it with a link in the chat.
• Your constraints — budget and deadline aren’t background preferences. On the homepage shortlist they’re applied to every pick before you see it — the next section spells out how. In the concierge chat they steer every answer, and suggestions come with prices so you can check them against your own numbers.

How budget and deadline are applied

• Budget is a hard ceiling on the shortlist — homepage picks come in at or under your budget, with how much room is left shown on each; anything over budget is flagged, not quietly recommended.
• The deadline gates shipping — every option carries a ship-by date, compared against your arrive-by date: “ships by Nov 3 — you’re safe,” or “too late.” When shipping time is genuinely unknown, we say “check before ordering” instead of inventing a date.
• Ranked by fit, top pick first — each option comes with its price, a plain-language reason it fits this specific person, a seller, and a buy link. “More options” re-runs the research against the same constraints.
• In the concierge chat — budget and deadline are part of the brief the agent reasons from, so it aims each suggestion at your numbers. Prices there are approximate, though — confirm the final price and delivery date on the seller’s page before you buy.

What we don’t do

• We don’t buy for you — the shortlist and the buy link are ours; the purchase is yours.
• We don’t publish what you enter — recipient profiles stay on your device.
• We don’t sell placement — the shortlist is ranked by fit to your brief and constraints, not by anyone’s payment.
• We don’t guess when we don’t know — unknown shipping is labeled unknown, never filled in.