Why Your Customers Love Gift Cards & How to Use Them to Get New Buyers

Acquiring new customers in today’s crowded ecommerce market requires more than traditional ad spend. Gift cards act as a built-in referral engine, encouraging your loyal shoppers to introduce your brand to friends, family, and colleagues.

When prospective buyers receive a gift card, they arrive at your store with immediate purchasing intent and lowered friction. This powerful strategy not only drives initial sales, but also boosts average order value as new customers frequently spend beyond the card's balance.

The Psychology: Why Shoppers Reach for A Gift Card Over A Guess

Gift card buyers pay you upfront and then hand your brand to someone who had never heard of your store, which is acquisition you cannot buy at any cost per click.

Customers love gift cards because they remove the guesswork from gifting, feel more personal than cash, and carry no pressure to spend immediately. For a business, that makes a gift card a prepaid acquisition voucher: the buyer pays upfront, hand-delivers your brand to a brand-new recipient, a share of balances are never redeemed, and you get a recipient's contact details to retarget. Used deliberately, gift cards acquire new buyers more cheaply and with higher intent than blanket discount codes.

Think about the last time you bought a present for a colleague you barely knew, or a teenager whose taste changes every fortnight. You either guessed wrong and watched them fake a smile, or you handed over a gift card and watched them relax. That relief is the product.

Compare that with a discount code. A code rewards someone who has already decided to buy from you, and it trains them to wait for the next sale. A gift card converts a person who had no intention of visiting your store at all. The giver chooses your brand, pays full price, and does the recommending for you.

• The giver absorbs the risk of choosing, so the recipient arrives with zero hesitation about your store.
• Recipients browse categories they would never have searched for, which widens your product discovery.
• Balances are often spent above the card value, lifting average order value without a discount.
• Each redemption introduces your brand to a genuinely new household.

Gift cards deserve a budget line next to your paid social spend, not a slot in the seasonal sidebar. In PrestaShop terms, you are not adding a novelty to your catalogue; you are opening a second front door.

Why This Matters

Gift cards are frequently filed under seasonal extras, which undersells what they actually do. They sit at the intersection of acquisition, cash flow, and retention, and they convert on all three fronts at once.

• New buyers arrive without any ad spend attached to them, because the giver absorbs the marketing cost.
• You receive payment before the product is chosen, which improves cash flow during quieter trading periods.
• Average order value tends to rise, since many recipients spend above the card's face value.
• Recipients are pre-qualified shoppers: someone in their life already decided your store was worth giving.
• Redemption is another chance to capture an email address and a marketing consent.
• Cards act as brand touchpoints sitting in wallets or inboxes for weeks.
• They give hesitant gift buyers an easy option when they don't know which product to choose.

Industry benchmarks suggest a mature gift card programme should generate 1-4% of a small business's total revenue, which for many stores is the difference between a flat quarter and a growing one.

Quick Wins

If you want results this week rather than this quarter, start here.

• Add a clear link to your gift card page in the main navigation, not buried in the footer.
• Place a gift card block on the cart page, where buyers are already in a spending mindset.
• Offer a digital option at checkout so the card can be delivered within minutes.
• Write gift card product descriptions that speak to the giver, not the recipient.
• Set gift card products to appear in relevant category listings so they get organic visibility.
• Add a short line to your order confirmation email reminding buyers that gift cards exist.
• Create one dedicated landing page explaining how redemption works.
• Include a printable card design for buyers who want to hand something over physically.

1. Sell Gift Cards as Products, Not as Support Tickets

Many stores treat gift cards as a customer service function: someone emails asking, and a staff member issues a code manually. That works at low volume and fails completely at scale, because it hides your gift card offering from every shopper who never thought to ask.

Listing gift cards as proper products in your PrestaShop catalogue puts them in front of people browsing your store. On PrestaShop, this means creating a product with combinations for each denomination, so a buyer selects a value the same way they'd select a size. The product appears in search, in category pages, and in your sitemap, a level of visibility a manual process can never match.

PrestaShop refers to add-ons as modules, and the Gift Card module handles the underlying mechanics: generating unique codes, applying them at checkout, and tracking balances.

• Create one gift card product with combinations for each value you want to offer.
• Set the product as virtual so no shipping is charged or calculated.
• Write a description aimed at the giver: "Not sure which scent? Let them choose."
• Add lifestyle imagery showing the card being handed over.
• Link to a short how-it-works page from the product description.

2. Use Digital Delivery To Remove Friction

The single biggest obstacle to a gift card purchase is timing. If a buyer remembers a birthday the day before, a physical card that arrives days later is useless to them. Digital delivery solves that, at no extra cost.

Digital cards also reach recipients instantly by email, which matters because the recipient is the person you actually want to acquire. When a digital card lands in their inbox, your branding lands with it, along with a clear call to action and the discount-free invitation to spend.

Research from TSG and Bank of America's 2026 study found that 27% of consumers purchased both digital and physical gift cards in 2025, which tells you the two formats complement rather than compete. Offering both means you capture the planner and the last-minute buyer.

• Offer instant email delivery alongside a printable physical option.
• Let the buyer schedule the delivery date if they're buying ahead.
• Include a personalised message field so the card feels considered.
• Add a reminder in the recipient's email about how to redeem and where to shop.

3. Target The Giver In Your Copy, Not the Recipient

Gift card pages written from the recipient's perspective waste their best asset. The person reading the page is the buyer, and the buyer has a specific problem: they don't know what the other person wants.

Write copy that acknowledges that problem directly. Phrases like "their size, their choice" or "let them pick the one they've been eyeing" speak to the giver's relief rather than the recipient's excitement. That framing converts because it names the anxiety the buyer walked in with.

The product photography should show the moment of giving, not the card floating on a white background. A photo of two hands exchanging an envelope says more than a render of a voucher, because the buyer is imagining the reaction, not the object.

• Open the description with the giver's problem, not the card's features.
• Use occasion-based headings such as birthdays, weddings, and thank-yous.
• Show the card being handed over rather than photographed flat.
• Keep terms, expiry, and redemption steps in a short block below the pitch.
• End with a single clear call to action rather than a wall of options.

How Do Gift Cards Work for Businesses and Customers?

A gift card is a prepaid balance someone buys from your shop, either for themselves or to hand to someone else. The buyer pays you the full amount today, receives a code or a card, and the recipient spends that balance with you later. From your side, it is cash in the till before a single product leaves the warehouse.

The giver is the buyer, the recipient is the spender, and those are rarely the same person. That split is the whole engine. The person who redeems the card is often visiting your store for the first time, arriving with a reason to buy and a spending limit already agreed.

Here is the typical journey in PrestaShop terms:

• The customer adds a gift card to the cart as if it were any other product, choosing a value and often a delivery date.
• The order is completed, and payment is captured immediately, so the revenue lands weeks or months before redemption.
• You issue a code, delivered by email or printed and posted, which the recipient can use on a future purchase.
• At checkout, the recipient enters the code, and the balance is applied against the cart total.
• You record the redemption against the original liability, and any leftover balance stays available for a later order.

That outstanding balance sits on your books as a liability, not pure profit, until someone spends it. Which brings us to breakage.

Breakage is the value on gift cards that never gets redeemed. Someone loses the email, forgets the code, or never gets round to ordering. That unredeemed balance stays with the business, and depending on where you trade, local rules may govern how long it can be held. Treat breakage as a bonus, never as the plan.

What are The Benefits of Offering Gift Cards to Customers, and To You?

Gift cards create two separate sets of wins: one for the person holding the card, and one for the store that issued it. Most articles only talk about the first. The second set is where the acquisition channel lives, because a gift card buyer is not just a customer; they are a customer with a recipient attached.

Start with the buyer's side. It is a low-risk purchase: no guessing a size, a colour or a taste, and no asking the person what they want. Across gift card research, 50% of consumers say they like letting the recipient buy their own gift. The recipient, meanwhile, gets choice instead of an obligation, which is why gift cards rarely end up in the returns pile.

What the Customer and Recipient Gain

• Certainty: no sizing errors, no duplicate presents, no wasted spend.
• Choice: the recipient picks the exact product, colour, and variant they actually want.
• Convenience: a digital card can be sent the same day, which matters for late and last-minute occasions.
• Flexibility on Value: the recipient can top up and buy something larger than the card's face value.
• Zero Shipping Anxiety: nothing has to arrive on time or survive the courier.

What the Merchant Gains

For your store, the mechanics matter more than the sentiment. You are paid before you deliver anything, so cash lands now while the cost of goods and fulfilment happens later. Some cards are never redeemed in full, and the value left on them stays with the business.

You also get reach you did not pay for. The giver introduces your shop to someone who may never have found it, and that new visitor arrives with a positive reason to browse. Baskets tend to be bigger too, because a card removes the "is this worth it?" hesitation and recipients frequently spend above the balance. Returns shrink as well: a guessed gift comes back, a chosen one usually does not.

A gift card turns one purchase into two people who know your store, and you get paid before either of them has seen a product.

If your store runs on PrestaShop, issuing and tracking these cards, certificates, and vouchers is handled through a dedicated module rather than manual codes. You can see how that works with the Gift Card PrestaShop module for certificates, vouchers, and coupons, which lets you manage balances and redemption without keeping a spreadsheet on the side.

Gift Cards vs Discount Codes for Acquiring New Customers

A discount code buys a transaction. A gift card buys a customer, and it does so with the buyer's money already sitting in your account. That distinction matters most when you measure acquisition rather than revenue. A code gives margin away to someone already close to purchasing; a gift card recruits two people at once, the giver who pays and the recipient who redeems.

Put the two side by side, and the acquisition maths stops being close.

The intent quality is where the gap widens. A code-trained shopper fills a basket to hit the threshold and leaves. A recipient holding a gift card has a defined budget, and no reason to hunt competitors, and industry data shows that half of consumers like gift cards precisely because they let the recipient choose their own gift. That shopper explores your full catalogue instead of your discount page.

Codes also cannibalise. Send a percentage-off code to your list and a meaningful share of redemptions come from people who would have paid full price that week anyway. A gift card cannot cannibalise the way a code does, because it is not a price cut; it is a sale. The recipient's purchase happens at your standard pricing, which protects the margin you need to keep acquiring.

Referral mechanics favour gift cards too. A code is shared in a public coupon thread and reaches strangers with no relationship to you. A gift card travels through a private channel, a birthday message, a thank-you note, a colleague's leaving present, and arrives carrying the giver's endorsement. When that recipient checks out, you collect a fresh email address and a fresh order, both of which you paid nothing for.

The practical conclusion: keep discount codes for clearing stock, reactivating lapsed buyers and rewarding loyalty. Use gift cards when the goal is net new buyers, because a gift card is the only promotion where a customer pays you up front for the privilege of introducing you to someone else.

How To Market Gift Cards to Get New Buyers, Step By Step

Setting up gift cards is the easy part. Getting them in front of buyers who would never have found your store otherwise is where the acquisition actually happens. Work through these steps in order, and you will have a channel that runs largely on its own.

1. Create the Products Themselves. In PrestaShop, set up a virtual product for the digital card so it is delivered by email the moment payment clears, and a physical product with a denomination attribute for a printed card you can post. Keep both under the same category so reporting stays clean. If you would rather not build the logic from scratch, a PrestaShop gift card module handles issuance, codes, and redemption for you.
2. Set Price Tiers That Make Sense. A handful of fixed denominations beats an open amount field. Common tiers cluster around the price of your most popular single item, a mid-range bundle, and one premium option. An open field invites indecision; a short list of clear choices gets the sale finished.
3. Add A Gifting Prompt Where Hesitation Happens. Place a short line on product pages above the add-to-cart button, offering the card as an alternative when the exact size, shade, or model is uncertain. At checkout, add a tick box asking whether the order is a gift, then route the recipient's email to a separate field. This is where the giver hands you their friend's inbox, which no discount code will ever do.
4. Run A Seasonal Push and An Experience Push. Time one campaign around your peak trading period, and run a second around a specific activity rather than a date: a spa card before a wedding season, a dinner card before a birthday-heavy month. Presenting the card as a shortcut to an experience converts better than presenting it as money.
5. Capture Recipient Details Honestly. Ask the buyer to confirm the recipient has agreed to receive the message, and give the recipient a clear way to opt out of future marketing. You gain a contact you could not buy, and you stay on the right side of consent rules.
6. Build the Retargeting Flow Before the First Card Sells. When a card is redeemed, tag the customer and drop them into a sequence that shows what the balance could buy next and when it expires. A new buyer who came in through someone else's wallet is now on your list.

None of this needs a large budget. It needs the setup done once and the prompts placed in the right two or three spots.

Best Gift Card Strategies for Turning Recipients into Repeat Buyers

Once your gift card module is live, the real work begins: turning a one-off redemption into further purchases. The strategies below assume the basics are already in place and focus instead on the moments after the card is bought, the moments after it is spent, and the business buyers who order in bulk. Each stands alone, so start with whichever fits your store's traffic and catalogue today.

Send Recipient-only Follow-up Offers

When someone redeems a gift card, they are usually a first-time buyer who arrived with a fixed budget and zero loyalty to your brand. Instead of letting their account go quiet after checkout, trigger a follow-up message that thanks them for redeeming and offers something the giver never received: a small credit or free delivery on their next order placed within a set window.

This works because the recipient has now experienced your packaging, delivery time, and product quality- exactly the trust a cold discount code cannot buy. A giver pays for the acquisition; the recipient's second purchase is earned. You can credit a customer's wallet automatically so the offer appears as a balance they can see, rather than a code they might lose.

Prompt A Top-up When the Balance Runs Low

A gift card that ends at zero is a closed loop. A gift card that ends slightly short of a nicer product is an open door.

Configure your store to show the remaining balance on the cart and checkout pages, then trigger a gentle message when that balance drops below the value of a popular item. The shopper sees how little they need to add to reach something better, and many will pay the difference themselves. It converts a passive balance check into an active upsell, using a number the customer already cares about.

• Display the remaining balance clearly at cart and checkout so there are no surprises
• Set the low-balance threshold to sit just under the price of a best-selling product
• Reword the prompt as an upgrade ("add a small amount to include the travel case") rather than a nag
• Keep the same prompt logic for both physical and digital cards so the experience is consistent

Bundle Gift Cards with Hero Products

A gift card sold on its own is a convenience purchase. A gift card bundled with a product people already want becomes a reason to buy now, and it introduces your best lines to a buyer who might never have searched for them.

Pick two or three products with strong reviews, then offer them alongside a card at a small saving. The bundle does two jobs at once: it raises the average order value of the giver's purchase, and it puts a physical product in the recipient's hands so they can form an opinion about your brand before the card is even spent.

Open A B2B Gifting Channel

Employee rewards, client thank-yous, and partner incentives are gift card purchases at a scale consumer buyers rarely reach. A single finance or HR contact can place an order worth dozens of individual sales, and every recipient becomes a first-time visitor to your store.

The practical barrier is admin, not demand. Large orders mean many codes, often with different values and delivery dates. Selling cards in editable PDF format lets a business buyer personalise each one, print it or email it, and distribute it without involving you for every name on the list. Pair that with clear guidance on bulk ordering, invoicing and lead times, and you turn a marketing team's annual reward budget into a predictable acquisition channel.

• Publish a simple bulk-order page aimed at HR, office managers and event organisers.
• Offer editable PDF gift cards so the buyer can add names and messages themselves.
• State your lead time and minimum order quantity plainly to avoid back-and-forth.
• Follow up a few months later, well before the next reward cycle is planned.

The giver pays for the introduction, but the recipient relationship is yours to keep, and every strategy above is really just a way of not wasting it.

Common Mistakes that Waste A Gift Card Programme

Most gift card programmes do not fail because customers dislike them. They fail because of four avoidable mistakes that quietly shrink both the revenue and the acquisition value of every card you sell.

Leaving Expiry and Terms Undisclosed

In many markets, gift cards sold to consumers must carry clearly stated expiry rules, and hidden terms are the fastest route to a consumer protection complaint. Even where you are free to set your own expiry, burying it in a terms page nobody reads turns a pleasant gift into a source of resentment for the recipient, who is not even the person who bought it.

Fix it by stating the expiry window on the product page, in the confirmation email, and on the card itself. In PrestaShop, you control the validity period directly on the gift card product, so set it once and let the system enforce it rather than relying on goodwill.

Treating the Recipient As An Afterthought

Sellers spend all their energy on the buyer, then hand the recipient a bare code in a plain email. Around half of consumers say they like gift cards precisely because they let them choose their own gift, so the recipient's experience is the entire point.

• Price the experience for the recipient, not just the transaction for the buyer. A slow, confusing redemption flow undoes the goodwill on the first visit.
• Make the balance easy to check and the code easy to apply in the cart, without forcing account creation as a condition of spending the card.
• Give the recipient a reason to browse beyond the card's value, and the average order will usually exceed the balance.

Discounting on Top of the Card

Stacking a site-wide discount on gift card purchases is a common own goal. You take the money for the card, then discount the same amount again when it is redeemed, and again if you run a promotion during the redemption window. The card already functions as a reason to shop; a second incentive shrinks your margin for no extra conversion.

Fix it by separating the two mechanisms. Let gift cards be the conversion tool for gifting occasions, and hold your discounts for other campaigns, or restrict them so they cannot apply to gift card purchases.

Booking Gift Card Sales As Pure Revenue

A gift card sale is not the same as a product sale. You have collected cash today for goods you have to fulfil later, which makes it a liability as much as a sale. More importantly, it is the cheapest paid acquisition channel you have, because the giver does the marketing for you, and most stores never measure it that way.

Track gift card buyers as a distinct cohort. How many are new to your store? How many of the recipients they send go on to buy something of their own? If you only look at the top-line number, you will never know whether your programme is acquiring customers or quietly discounting the ones you already had.

Implementation Roadmap

Strategies work best in a sequence, because each one depends on the plumbing the previous step put in place. Follow this order, and you will avoid building campaigns on top of a checkout that cannot yet apply a code.

1. Set Up the Product. Create the gift card as a virtual PrestaShop product with denomination combinations, configure validity and delivery, and confirm a code can be issued and applied at checkout.
2. Write the Giver-facing Copy. Rebuild the product description around the buyer's problem, add occasion headings, and swap the imagery for the moment of giving.
3. Place the Prompts. Add the gift card link to the main navigation and the cart page, and add the gift tick box and recipient email field at checkout.
4. Turn On Digital Delivery. Offer instant email delivery with a scheduled date option, and keep a printable physical variant for buyers who want to hand something over.
5. Activate the Follow-up Flow. Tag recipients at redemption, trigger the low-balance prompt, and set the recipient-only follow-up offer before the first card sells.
6. Build the Bundles and the B2B Page. Pair cards with two or three hero products, then publish a bulk-order page with lead times and editable PDF cards.
7. Measure & Iterate. Track gift card buyers as a separate cohort, watch how many recipients buy again, and adjust denominations, prompts, and expiry messaging based on what the data shows.

Recommended Tools & Resources

You can run gift cards with manual codes and a spreadsheet, but the admin grows faster than the revenue. The tools below are the ones that genuinely support the strategies in this guide.

For the core mechanics, the Gift Card PrestaShop module for certificates, vouchers, and coupons covers issuance, code generation, balance tracking, and redemption, which is everything the first four strategies in this guide need. It also supports the voucher and certificate formats that business buyers tend to request.

For holding the recipient follow-up credit, the Advance Customer Wallet System lets a customer see a balance rather than a code they might lose, which suits the low-balance top-up prompt particularly well.

If you sell cards that recipients customise, such as photo gifts, Product Images by Customers lets shoppers upload their own images at the point of purchase. And when order volumes rise, a help desk module keeps redemption questions out of your personal inbox.