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…
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.
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??
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
