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
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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:
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
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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!!
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.
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Hey Scott! Pls, send me an email to nadav@rise-ai.com, I believe we can figure it out 
Hi, I am also interested in this solution. We are looking only for gift card functionalities.
Is there any news on this? You would think it’s a standard feature since it’s…a gift. Including notes.
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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 removed]
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.
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I completely agree as we are currently facing the same issue. This is something SO basic that should be available to all us merchants.
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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.
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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 
.
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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.
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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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Just adding my vote to making this a feature. Seems silly that it isn’t.
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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.
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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.
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Agreed. Shopify is such a disgusting platform for nickel and diming you into 100 apps to serve basic functionality.
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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.
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Agree 100%. This feature used to exist, so why has it been removed?
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