[jilly]

I am interested in something like a virtual gift shop where a member could buy balloons or flowers or something for each other.

LiveJournal is doing something like this:
"Starting today you can go to the Gift Shop to purchase virtual gifts to be delivered to the user info page of anyone with a LiveJournal account. You can choose a gift of one red rose, one yellow rose, a dozen red roses, balloons, or a box of chocolates, and you can send a personalized note with each one so you can show off your own haiku skills. Each virtual gift will display on the recipient's profile page for two weeks before wilting away. You can send virtual gifts for any occasion from birthdays to anniversaries, or for no occasion at all."

It would be interesting if we could make it show up on the user's profile page for two weeks aka Livejournal's, or if not, just show up in a PM or email, or both (maybe an option to do pm, email or both)

Also would be cool if it could be combined with a 'automatically post a thread in specified forum' sort of hack, so that when a user purchases flowers or chocolate or whatever, a thread could automatically be started in a specified forum, with the card/icons showing up in the post.

It could be a service that people could purchase, using the subscription service, for like .99 cents per order, and the money would go to your site, or it could be integrated with a ucahs/ebux system, so users could buy them with points, and even cooler would be both, so a user could have the choice of using ebux/ucash or purchasing with paypal.