Gift Giving Guy

Are you among the 125 million users with credit cards linked to iTunes? If yes, Apple makes last-minute gift giving easy to a fellow iTunes user. This week, I sent my friend and office mate his Christmas gift — the thriller Inception — using iTunes. Here’s how you can immediately send iTunes gifts via e-mail.

Launch iTunes, click iTunes Store and choose from 12 million songs, 55,000 television episodes, 8,500 movies and 300,000 iPhone apps. When you find the item to give, follow these steps.

Click the arrow on the right side of the Buy button.

A drop-down menu appears. Select the “Gift This” option.

iTunes takes you to a “Give a Gift” screen. To send the iTunes gift as an email, keep the delivery option set to “Send gift as email.” Enter your name and your recipient’s name. Make sure you have the correct email address then type it for “Recipient’s Email.” If you want to send to multiple giftees, separate the email addresses with commas. Type the e-mail address or addresses in again to verify. Now enter a brief personal message. Please note if you take too much time with your message, iTunes will time out your session and ask you to start over. Click the Continue button.

iTunes will prompt you to sign in with your Apple ID or AOL screen name and password to buy the gift. Enter both and click the Continue button. You’ll see a review page. Confirm your entries and, if correct, click the Buy Gift button. iTunes will display a “Thank You” screen indicating your gift has been sent. Within minutes, your gift recipient receives an email to redeem the gift on iTunes.