At the homepage I'm presented with two options that are not relevant to me, and I have to strain my eyes a bit to find the alternative link (light blue on a very saturated cream) that just dumps me on a page full of everything. Too overwhelming.

What if instead of assuming the user is there for two reasons or no reason at all, give them a list of potential options. I'd assume most people going to the site are doing so for birthdays, so being able to sort by age, gender or interest is relevant right off the bat. I can't ever find the site that I felt did this best.. I want to say it was called "Wanttts"/"Wanted" or something.

As far as that initial selection is concerned, if you decide to keep it, I should only need to click once on my option to have the filter activated instead of clicking once on the option and clicking a second time to submit that option. I'm now two clicks into Father's Day and there are zero options for me, and I can't click my back button.

As a normal user, I'd be frustrated enough with the site at this point to leave it and go to Amazon.

Now clicking into Mother's Day gifts, I'm presented with radio options, despite the fact that my mother could be all of those things. I click on Stylish & Whimsical (which honestly doesn't even make sense for these two to be paired together) and get a list of 5 items that are neither stylish nor whimsical (a knife, a bland sweater, a set of wooden coasters, a rainbow headwrap and some wine glass lamps). In fact, my mom would probably roll her eyes at all of those. They are simply not thoughtful gifts.

As a normal user, I'd probably be done with the site at this point.

The star on each image is way too big and insinuates I'd be favoriting the item for later rather than adding it to my shopping cart. I didn't even read the text above it because I thought it was a page title (as it's an H3), not instructions on how to use the site.

So let's say my mom is equally silly and into knives, so I click the star on the knife in hopes that I'll see other gifts like it. No, instead I'm on a screen that tells me the price of the knife and would I like to add it to my cart. I click back because I'm not sure what that page was all about and I'm taken all the way back to the homepage where I'm being told to start all over again.

As a normal user, I'd definitely be done with the site at this point.

Okay, let's try this again.

I go through the exact same process, clicking the exact same options.. and I get different results? Where were all these options before? Five random options is just not enough for me to feel your site is effectively helping me choose something personalized. Again, under Stylish & Whimsical, I see items that are neither (perfume, cheap-looking bookstand, tacky seedboxes, a Samurai umbrella (what?) and a wire cage shaped like a barrel for corks).

Having the notification show up on the "View Gifts" button is the reason I clicked on it before, because I assumed that was the next action, even though the header tells me to click on the star to show more options. Progressive actions should be on the right side, stagnating/reverse options should be on the left. Likewise, the only time a button should be orange or red (unless it's notably thematic across the site) is when it is a negative action. A shopping cart view in particular should be in the top/primary navigation.

In continually clicking through the suggestions, I'm not finding anything that makes me think that the initial category I selected at the beginning has anything to do with the gifts I'm being shown, nor does it look to be actively filtering based on additional things I keep starring. And as noted before, all of these gifts are pretty bad/cheap-looking.

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TL;DR

- The design needs a lot of work (the palette, the UX) and it should be a lot easier to navigate and understand what is going on. As others have mentioned, taking control of the back button is a terrible idea.

- The items you have aren't thoughtful/curated enough and the photography is weak (not that you can help it necessarily, but a better design would lessen how much it affects the overall appearance and I'd imagine that the more luxury the brand, the better the photos). When I'm looking for gifts using services like this, I'm doing it because I want to find unique items; probably gifts that cost a little extra to begin with. The items on your site are all things I could find on Amazon within a few clicks. If I wanted ThinkGeek-quality gifts, I'd go to Spencer's.

- Have users search by more specific keywords/interests instead of trying to lump people into categories they either don't fit into at all or that multiple could apply to.

There are a lot of gift-searching sites out there, and a lot of them have these same issues. What problem were you trying to solve with site? Why would people use a specialty service to find the same types of things that show up on Google Shopping or incentivized Bing Shopping searches? I guess I don't understand why already-popular vendors are listed at all. Gift-finding services should be about highlighting unique gifts that are handmade or crafted by specialists, curated by tastemakers. You don't need to advertise for Nordstrom's.