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Gift Cards Make Gifting Simple

With no doubts, gift cards became common ecommerce products, just like clothing and electronics, and are widely used by both small retailers and huge international businesses.

Gift Cards Make Gifting Simple

The reasons for this are obvious - customers like purchasing gift cards for their relatives, friends, colleagues, and other close people. The advantages of gift card products for businesses are also clear. Any gift card is able to:

  • Increase brand awareness. In order to redeem gift cards, their recipients often visit your store for the first time. And if all the aspects of the shopping experience suite them well, they can become your regular customers.

  • Get payments in advance. Gift cards generate early cash flows even before you start shipping items to end customers.

  • Generate more sales. Quite often customers with gift codes are inclined to make purchases more expensive than the nominal value of the received cards. So, this way you can encourage higher average order values in your store.


Note: Consider that 65% of shoppers spend extra 38% above the nominal amounts of their gift cards, according to giftcardgranny.com.

Going deeper, there are two basic types of gift cards - physical and virtual. The last ones are primarily used in ecommerce, but online merchants may sell both or, even better, mix the above functions and distribute gift cards applicable across all the channels. Anyway, let’s dwell on the virtual type of gift cards, as it is primarily used by online retailers.


Making Attracting and Efficient Digital Gift Cards


For customers, gift cards are usual products with original attributes, which is, in fact, the approach used by the Gift Card extension. The module allows Magneto 2 store owners to take advantage of all the benefits provided by gift cards in general and some unique functions provided by the extension.

Unconditional Benefits


Virtual Gift Cards are Free
Unlike physical cards that create some additional expenses for merchants to be produced and delivered, physical gift cards are totally free.

Suitable for Last-minute Customers
As far as virtual gift cards are delivered and can be used just immediately they may become the last resort for belate gifters.

Generated Benefits


Create Gift Card Product Pages
Although gift codes are just digital information, customers pay real money for them. So, they need to see at least a virtual representation of the purchased products.

A regular product page for gift cards allows customers to perceive it as a usual product, especially if it is also presented by different designs, e.g. for birthdays, Halloween or Christmas. For this purpose, you can definitely use our extension.

The Gift Card extension for Magento 2 treats gift cards as a new type of Magento products and allows you to deal with it accordingly. So, you can easily create one or several gift card pages with several prices, designs, and other product attributes.

Gift Cards on 404 Pages
If a customer appears on the “not found” page of your store, we can presume that he or she was not able to find a particular product. Of course, we can offer him an alternative one, but we can also remind him that he can purchase a gift card.

Of course, this option is perfectly suitable in the case if he is currently looking for a present or gift. Anyway, the customers that do not exactly know or could not find the products to be gifted can eagerly dwell on this universal option.

Shipping and Taxes Covered by Gift Cards
People receiving gifts are usually do not want to care about additional payments, including shipping or taxes. So, gift card codes need to be able to cover those expenses and allow recipients to get their gifts without additional payments. This opportunity is also supported by our extension.

Gift Codes Expiration Terms
In fact, customers do not like the gift codes with short expiration periods. Moreover, sometimes long validity terms are required by certain laws, which is actually beneficial for both sides, as it makes gift cards more attractive for customers.

Allow Customers to Send Personal Messages
Since the recipients of gift codes may have no idea about your store, sending emails on behalf of gifters is going to be a smart idea to make the email recognizable and welcomed.

Additionally, the gift email should also contain the information about the provided gift card, including the gift code, its nominal, expiration dates, etc.

Best Moments for Gifts
The main occasions to sell gift cards are still quite traditional. According to the study made by InComm, 82% of respondents said they would like to receive gift cards for birthdays, 42% would love to get them as a thank you, 39% - for graduations, 37% - for weddings, and 34% - for anniversaries.

Younger respondents, Millennials, for example, find them suitable for newborn celebrations (50%), and 29% find it perfect in the case of new house purchases. The national holidays are also attractive for gifters, and they traditionally purchase gift cards on Christmas, Mother’s and Father’s days, and so on.

So, your customers will certainly appreciate those opportunities to send gift cards designed and tailored for the above occasions.

Gift Card Nominals
The average gift card value in 2017 is $105 and decreased significantly since 2016 when it was about $144. So, it seems that there is no much need to create gift card products with higher values, however, you should make sure that you also offer chipper options, so all your customer groups could take advantage of the tool.

But, if you want to leave the decision at the customer's discretion, you can take advantage of the gift cards with open values. And, the Gift Card extension for Magento 2 provides you with this very opportunity. Note that the gift cards with open amounts can also be limited by minimal and maximal required nominals if needed.

Gift Cards for Magento 2


All the mentioned above benefits of virtual and physical gift cards can be easily obtained with the Gift Card extension. More than that, the module provides Magento merchants with full control over the provided functions, allows them to send gift cards from the backend, track gift card balances, use specific gift card pools for particular products, import/export card codes, etc.

And one more thing. The omnichannel retailers, with both online stores and physical outlets, will soon be able to allow their customer to use gift cards across all the channels. The upcoming integration of the Gift Card extension for Magento 2 and ConectPOS by SmartOSC will allow customers to use their either physical or virtual gift cards both online and offline depending on their preferences.