How can customers send gift cards directly to recipients from a website?

[jkapner1970]

How do I enable customers to send a gift card directly to the recipient from my website? I want to give my customers the option to buy a gift card for someone else and have the website deliver the single-use code directly to the recipient without the customer having to manually forward the email themselves. This way the “gift” aspect still has meaning. Is this possible? I think I have seen it on other websites but not sure if that is something Shopify offers or if the merchants outsourced that task. All advice welcome

[Lara]

Hi, @jkapner1970

Lara here from Shopify!

Great question! This is not possible at the moment in the admin, the card will be sent automatically to the buyer, but there's a few great apps that were developed specially for this and can help you manage where the gift card will be sent to such as:

• Shopkeeper Gift Card Scheduler
• Giftee

I do understand how this would be a great feature to have on the Admin, and I'll be passing along your request to the team responsible.

Hope this suits your needs!

All the best! Lara

[rrjj45]

Is there any news on this? You would think it's a standard feature since it's....a gift. Including notes.

[Neomi_av]

Hi all! I'm Neomi from Rise.ai app,

As Nadav mentioned, with Rise.ai you can send the gift card directly to the recipient, add a note and schedule It for the perfect time.

As a merchant you can fully customize your gift card so it will match your brand voice and tone.

This is one of my favorite Rise merchants gift card page - Paw.com

Check out our listing page, and feel free to contact me at [email protected]

[heatherlyles]

Gift cards are not gift cards if they can't be sent to a recipient other than yourself.  We should not have to pay for a 3rd party app for a basic feature.  This needs to be fixed quickly.

[casaziki]

I completely agree as we are currently facing the same issue. This is something SO basic that should be available to all us merchants.

[CWSTeam]

Yes, shopify should please do something about this! It is great that they added on the gift card option recently but the notification to the recipient is an important part as well.

[roman1991]

We upgraded to the $79 plan specifically to keep gift cards customers on our site instead of the alternative third-party GC app's that direct customers to there domain. We found out the hard way how valuable the recipient address is this holiday season. It costed us refunds and lots of confusion for customers. We'll be downgrading plans until this simple feature is developed.

On a side note, Shopify's price per share just reached an all time high of $1,285.19, way to go, I guess 🤔.

[rellinge]

Yup.  This is one of our top customer service complaints and we have no good answer for them.  The tell us how tacky it is to forward an email. 

[HKJ]

This is a legitimate complaint and it's very unprofessional of Shopify to have not addressed this.

There are two workarounds I can think of which don't involve a paid (or any) app.

1) Instead of having the customer purchase a digital gift card, make a product listing for a gift card with the same denominations you would want for digital gift cards (this is what you would do if you were selling physical gift cards, and if you are, you can direct your customers to the same listing).

Rather than fulfilling the order by shipping physical cards, you can fulfill the order by issuing a gift card (from the Shopify app, under products-gift cards-issue gift card) to the intended recipient.

You can also issue the gift card to yourself (which would allow you to have access to the code) and then forward that email to your customer's intended gifted.

2) Have the purchaser temporarily change their email address to that of the intended recipient.

These are not optimal, but should work. Shopify has really dropped the ball by not fixing this glitch which has been brought to their attention numerous times.

[sea2table]

Just adding my vote to making this a feature. Seems silly that it isn't.

[elettra]

This was carefully prioritized, but in the end they made the idiotic spinning globe live view instead. 

[BGates]

It has been nearly 2 years since this feature request, and still nothing has been done to solve it? The whole point of a gift card is to be able to send it to a recipient. Why are we being forced into paying for yet another app when this should be a standard feature across the board??

[navril]

I also can't believe that this is not part of basic functionality. It can't be rocket science. It shouldn't listed as a feature until adding a gift recipient is available. 

[Jason432]

This is honestly the most unthought out feature: a gift card you cannot gift. This should be something that is expedited to fix. It's in the name, "Gift Card". You don't buy gift cards for yourself. You buy them for other people.

[HKJ]

You are buying it for someone else. You buy it from the store, then send it to the giftee.

[Jason432]

Yes, everyone here knows that. The default setup in Shopify doesn't work like normal gift cards. When you buy a gift card through a Shopify store, it makes it send the gift card to the person who bought it, not to the recipient.....then you have to forward it to the recipient. That's cheesy. You know how we know it's cheesy? Because there are a plethora of paid apps that fix this problem. Shopify has added another cost to store owners....why even offer the "gift card" option when it doesn't even work properly. 

The End.

[Lawson_Thalmann]

With all due respect to Rise.ai, with the amount of orders in our store, it would be $600+/mo just to add this functionality. This is a standard feature of most of Shopify's competitors. See BigCommerce's functionality: https://support.bigcommerce.com/s/article/Gift-Certificates?language=en_US 

This is not a situation where it's a 'nice to have' that the product team should ponder over. This would fall into the realm of common sense in my opinion. It leads to so many friction points for staff and customers. We constantly get asked why other retailers can do this simple functionality and we can't. We're left with no other explanation other than 'Shopify doesn't support that'. In fact, on our old legacy system that we switched from, we had this functionality about 10 years ago... It's a huge competitive disadvantage to not offer this. 

[sharistea]

Hello,

This was 2 years ago and I still don't see this feature. Is this something that will be coming soon? Gift cards are a huge part of my business and sending it directly to the recipient is important. I have a feeling that the gift card apps are paying Shopify a lot of money to turn a blind eye to this issue. 🙄

And for the previous person who called our customers "lazy" ... how about you forward over 150 gift cards to your clients every holiday. I'm sure you wouldn't like it.  

[MikeCDG]

This exists now: https://changelog.shopify.com/posts/send-gift-cards-directly-to-the-recipient-and-include-a-message

[Lawson_Thalmann]

Can we do it in ShopifyPOS? 

[MikeCDG]

AFAIK not yet. You could do it with a custom POS app if you're on Plus, but not natively.

[Nadav_Berger]

Hi @jkapner1970, Nadav here from Rise.ai (https://apps.shopify.com/rise-ai). I’m so glad you asked! Rise enables your customers to send gift cards directly to the recipient from the website, along with other features. Our solution enables both you, the merchant, and the customer to customize how the gift card is displayed both on your website and in the recipient's inbox. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions or to set a demo!!

[Scott25]

I would love your app for the gift card functionality but that is all I need and don't want to spend $200 / month for that.

[Nadav_Berger]

Hey Scott! Pls, send me an email to [email protected], I believe we can figure it out 🙂

[DMK]

Hi, I am also interested in this solution. We are looking only for gift card functionalities.

[coreyegan]

Customers purchase gift cards and thoughtfully fill out a gift note-- only to have me tell them they then have to forward the email themselves. SO TACKY.

At the very least I should be able to view the redemption code so if the customer wants me to mail a printed out card with the code and a gift note I can do it from my end. 

[HKJ]

---

@coreyegan wrote:

Customers purchase gift cards and thoughtfully fill out a gift note-- only to have me tell them they then have to forward the email themselves. SO TACKY.

At the very least I should be able to view the redemption code so if the customer wants me to mail a printed out card with the code and a gift note I can do it from my end. 

---

A lot of people have had your complaint, but personally if I were giving a gift card, I would want it to come from me, not from the store.

If your customer wants it to come from the store, or have you ship a physical card, they can send the digital card and code to you.

[hanka7n]

I agree, you can always send the gift card from your email. I don't understand the frustration.

[James22222]

Agreed. Shopify is such a disgusting platform for nickel and diming you into 100 apps to serve basic functionality.  

[lolly87]

Just adding our agreement to this! This seems beyond basic - how is it a GIFT voucher if you cannot have it sent directly to the person you are buying it for instead of having your customer forward an email? Have had customer complaints already and will have more I'm sure. 

[Silkbody-2]

Agree 100%.  This feature used to exist, so why has it been removed?

[steejaymes]

Hi, I've found a way to at least give a purchaser the option to send elsewhere. 

On my own store I have a "recipients name" and "recipients email" custom forms which allow the purchaser to send a gift. 

You will have to turn off auto-fulfil of gift cards and use the information gathered to send the gift cards manually but the purchaser should not see the delay for this manual procedure.

The recipient details are shown on the customer invoices and digital order.

I've added in the description that if no recipient information is provided then the gift card will be sent directly to purchaser email, and they can they forward themselves.

Just a side note to say that some fraudsters prefer to purchase high amount gift cards and then go on to make transactions, so please do the usual fraud checks and be aware of this.

I used this really helpful tutorial to do the customisation... 

https://community.shopify.com/c/Shopify-Design/Product-pages-Get-customization-information-for-produ...

I didn't need to do the latter part of the tutorial as the recipient details already showed in the basket for my theme (debut).

I hate third party integrations, not only are you having to pay for it, but you are also passing over your sensitive customer data which I really don't like to do if I can prevent it.

Hope this helps 🙂

[Jason432]

Unfortunately, the tutorial doesn't match up well with my theme files....it's not a one for one exchange. Hopefully I can figure it out without breaking anything. This is so stupid that we even have to go this route. Gift Card this function is not!

[Jason432]

If I am reading this correctly, you turn off auto-fulfill which doesn't send the card anywhere. This would mean the purchasers is solely relying on a person (us) to make this happen. Which basically means we have to watch the store throughout the day, every day with no break so there is no long delay in the third party recipient from getting their gift? Am I understanding this correctly? 

[Sulu71]

Any update on this? Not having this feature is costing us $$ and we shouldn't have to pay for a 3rd party app.  If they would simply add the option  'email' to Shipping Contact Info section in addition to the phone number, this would most likely be solved easiest.

[Ss]

Mind boggling that this is still a thing.

[Jason432]

You mean that Shopify won't allow the customer to send it directly to their recipient like all other e-gift cards work? 

[HilaB]

Hey @Jason432!

I'm Hila and I'm from Rise.ai, a gift card & loyalty solution for Shopify,

Correct, this isn't a possibility to do natively in Shopify.

Having said that, you can use Rise.ai to send the gift card straight to the recipient, and you can also enable scheduling and customers can add a personal message and choose an image. 

You can check out this video to see how it looks! 

You can check out our app page here 😊

[Ss]

Pay an additional $16/month to be able to add an email address for the recipient? 🛐

[Jason432]

Or more! Imagine being a business just starting out with little money and you are offered a free "gift card" as an option. You find out it really isn't a gift card, but a balance card for yourself that you can forward to others.....because that's what it is as/is. Don't call it a "gift card", it's not. <---- that's the point. Judging by all the videos I have seen on the topic, people are very annoyed. You can say "Pay an additional $16/month" all you want, but not everyone starting out is loaded....probably one of the reasons they want to go into business for themselves. So, your $16/month comes out to $192 a year on top of all other monthly expenses. If you can't see the disappointment people have with the Shopify Gift Card, more power to you. I'm personally over it, but people keep commenting BECAUSE people are continually disappointed in the "gift card" feature. 

[HKJ]

There's an app which offers customization and recipient email receipt for
$10 a month.

Sure it's a gift, like anything else you buy in store then give to the
recipient.

If I buy a nice, gift wrapped bottle of wine in a liquor store, then send
or give it to my friend, is it not a gift just because it wasn't delivered
from the store?

I get that people are too lazy to forward an email, but why is it cheesy?
Just remove the forwarding information and send the email.

[marcbackwell]

I have to disagree. You can't compare buying something on Shopify with buying it at a physical store. When you buy a physical gift for someone on Shopify, you can get it delivered straight to the recipient's address. It doesn't have to be sent to your own address first, for you to forward to the recipient. Why should this be so hard for Shopify to implement as a very basic functionality?

[Gary-Artisan-IT]

Hi everyone,

Shopify now has the ability to send gift cards directly to a recipient on version 9 of the free Shopify themes (may be available on premium themes but have not been able to test).

[madamshai]

Thanks Gary, but do you know how to code it into an older theme that can't be updated to the newer versions?

[nladart]

I would love to know how to do this on a 1.0 theme as well. 

[Gary-Artisan-IT]

Hi Madamshai,

I am not sure as the version 1.0 theme code is no longer available in Shopify.

My advice would be to upgrade to an online store 2.0 theme if you are able to do so, as these themes offer the ability to customise templates across the website within the theme customiser and will be supported by Shopify / 3rd party theme developers.

Gary

[Birgita]

It worked perfectly for the free Craft theme! Thanks for letting us know this is now available.

[MLYARROW]

They added this feature last year. You just need to enable the option in your DEFAULT PRODUCT template. Here's the step by step>> https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/customizing-themes/add-gift-card-recipient-fi...