Gift cards have become an increasingly popular gifting option across the world, with sales projected to exceed $510 billion in 2025. Despite the success big brands like Amazon, Apple, and Airbnb have had using gift cards to boost revenue, many small and medium-sized businesses have yet to leverage this powerful growth tool.
Traditionally, setting up a gift card program was challenging, costly, and complicated with large upfront costs and custom builds. However, modern tools (like Cardivo) let businesses of any size launch powerful gift card programs quickly and with no upfront or fixed ongoing cost.
In this guide, we’ll cover the key things you should look for when selecting gift card software for your business, including must-have features, what day-to-day gift card management looks like, compare physical vs digital gift cards, and we’ll outline why we believe Cardivo is an excellent choice for many businesses.
Here’s what we cover below. You can jump to individual sections but we recommend reading from start to finish.
Who is gift card software for?
Gift card management: what you’ll do day to day
10 essential features to look for in gift card software
How gift card redemption works
Physical vs digital gift cards
How much does gift card software cost?
What is gift card software?
Gift card software helps businesses create, sell, manage, and track gift cards and gift card redemptions. (Depending on where you are, you might call them gift vouchers or gift certificates, but it’s the same thing.) Good gift card software should automate repetitive or tedious tasks, offer relevant security and management features, make it easy for people to buy your gift cards, and allow you as the business owner to focus on your core business. From designing branded cards to tracking sales, redemptions and balances, effective gift card software should help you sell more, with minimal extra admin and be easy to use.
We’re biased, but we believe Cardivo is an excellent choice for business owners that like powerful but simple tools to grow their business. Cardivo lets you offer beautiful branded digital gift cards in minutes that are only redeemable at your business. It needs no code or technical know-how and takes under 10 minutes to be up and running. There are no fixed monthly fees or credit card needed either so it’s completely risk-free to try. Read more.
Who is gift card software actually for?
Short answer: Almost any business. If you sell a quality product, service or experience that your customers would happily gift to a friend or family, you can probably benefit from offering gift cards. A good online gift card system works just as well for a one-person small business as it does for a big brand. In fact, it’s a particularly strong fit for small businesses because it helps bring in cash upfront and very likely brings you new customers too, this is rare for any marketing channel! Cardivo works well for most types of businesses including:
- Digital products & services: software, templates, design work, agencies, freelancers, or anyone selling online
- SaaS businesses: With our easy redemption API, or Stripe hosted checkout integration your customers can easily redeem their gift cards
- Coaches, course creators & memberships: where a gift card is the perfect “try this thing, it’s awesome” nudge.
- Experiences & bookings: studios, classes, retreats, glamping, wellness, anything with a high ticket price – since your loyal customers want to share their experience with their friends and family
- Restaurants, cafes and offline retail: Cardivo’s easy manual redemption options make it painless to redeem a customer’s gift card when they walk in or at payment time and take that amount off the bill – your POS vendor can also choose to integrate it directly into their checkout with our free and open API. Buying gift cards is easy too – you can create a printed QR code that takes customers straight to the purchase page and lets them buy a gift card in seconds.
- Online stores: if you run WooCommerce or Shopify, gift cards plug straight into checkout.
- Event organisers: Cardivo gift cards can be redeemed on Eventbrite events, manually via the admin dashboard for in-person redemptions and even on WooCommerce event plugins like Event Tickets Plus.
In summary, it’s hard to think of any business that can’t benefit from gift cards. The common thread of course is having a product, service or experience that is good quality and that your customers would want to recommend to their network.
Running a small business? See how Cardivo works as gift card software for small business.
Why should you consider offering gift cards?
Offering gift cards for your business has a few key benefits:
💵 Get paid in advance
When someone buys a gift card for your business, you get paid that amount immediately without providing any product or service until it is redeemed. This can significantly improve your cashflow. Companies like Starbucks have billions of dollars in gift card balances.
🙋♀️ Let your best customers bring you new customers
Customers that love your business will be the ones typically buying your gift cards and sending them to their friends and family for special occasions. This is a powerful endorsement of your business and brings you new customers, while you get paid for it.
🛍️ More sales
Gift cards not only increase the average spend from existing customers, but the majority of people redeeming gift cards tend to spend more than the value of the original gift card in the first purchase alone, not to mention repeat purchases.
🎁 People prefer gift cards
Gift cards are consistently one of the most gifted categories for Christmas and through the year. This is one of the fastest growing gifting categories across the world and a majority of people prefer it over traditional gifts. By not having an easy gift card option, your best customers are buying gift cards from your competitors or the big corporations instead.
When you combine the above reasons with an easy to use gift card system that automates the entire process, you have no risk, just potential upside. Here are some key features to look for when considering gift card software.
In 2024, Starbucks reported ~ $1.87 billion in unredeemed gift card balances. These are effectively a free loan given to the business to boost cashflow and grow the business. Let your customers do the same for you (albeit at a smaller scale).
Gift card management: what you’ll do day to day
Selling gift cards is only half the job. The other half is managing them once they’re out in the world, and that’s where good gift card management software (sometimes called gift card tracking software) saves you hours. Here’s what managing a gift card program looks like in practice, and what your software should let you do in a few clicks:
- Look up any gift card: find a card by its number or the recipient’s email and see its balance, status and full redemption history.
- Redeem in full or in part: take the full value or just part of it off a bill, with the remaining balance updated automatically.
- Track balances automatically: every redemption, on every channel, updates the same balance, so there’s nothing to reconcile in a spreadsheet.
- Fix delivery problems: change the recipient’s or sender’s email, and fix mistyped addresses the system flags as invalid.
- Schedule delivery: buyers can schedule a gift card to arrive on a birthday or holiday, and it sends itself on the day.
- Freeze a card: pause a gift card you’re worried about and unfreeze it once it’s sorted.
- Set expiry rules: choose whether your gift cards expire, and when, in line with your local gift card laws.
- Run promotions: create discount codes, including codes that apply automatically, to drive sales during busy seasons.
- Let recipients serve themselves: recipients get their own branded gift card page where they can check their balance 24/7, so your inbox stays quiet.
- Bring in your team: invite staff so they can look up and redeem gift cards without sharing a login.
- Turn sales on or off: pause your gift card sales page anytime without affecting cards already sold.
If a tool makes any of these hard, or needs you to email support to do them, you’ll feel it every week. Cardivo includes all of the above at no extra cost.
10 essential attributes to look for in gift card software
Selecting the right gift card software can seem overwhelming, but focusing on these essential attributes can help you make the right decision:
1. Ease of use
Choose software that’s intuitive and easy to use. User-friendly software allows you to start quickly, reduces frustration, and helps you and your team easily manage your gift card program without needing expensive consultants or account managers.
2. An excellent customer experience
In this day and age, any software that doesn’t provide an excellent and easy customer experience for gift card buyers and recipients is not one you want to use. The gift card software you choose represents your business and your brand.
Ensure you’re choosing a platform that lets your customers buy a gift card in seconds from any device with multiple payment methods, while delivering a smooth and painless experience for those receiving and redeeming the gift card.
3. Flexible redemptions
You want your gift cards to be redeemable anywhere you do business – whether it’s your eCommerce store, your mobile app, custom setup, or even in-person or over the phone. Choose a system that is flexible when it comes to redemption options. This also makes it future-proof if you switch platforms or add new services.
4. Customization and control
You want a gift card system that lets you add your brand elements but also configure your gift cards how you want – whether it’s custom designs, custom colors, expiry periods, custom terms and more. It should also let you check the status of any gift card via a dashboard and give you handy admin and security controls.
5. Automation
Your goal is to get more sales, not to spend more time and resources on admin. When you choose a gift card tool, pick one that automates everything as much as possible. A good system will be designed to automate the buying, sending, emails, redemption, balance checks and more and keep your admin to a minimum.
6. Insights
Well designed gift card software should give you all the important insights and numbers you need to effectively offer and measure the effectiveness of your gift card program, without being complex. Look for a simple dashboard where you and your team can log in and see how many gift cards you’ve sold, their statuses, and more.
7. Multi-currency support
Many businesses today sell to customers in multiple countries. This is even more relevant if you sell something digital or deliver a service virtually. Perhaps you allow customers to shop on your store in their native currency? You want a gift card system that lets customers buy in their native currency to avoid expensive international transaction fees.
8. Cost-effectiveness
Affordability is essential, particularly for small businesses. Look for transparent, flexible pricing without hidden fees. Opt for solutions offering a pay-as-you-go pricing model to better manage your cash flow. Avoid any long term or lock-in contracts or tools with large upfront or expensive fixed costs. Your business tools should be nimble and adaptive to the ups and downs in your business.
9. Closed-loop system
Ensure the system you choose lets you add and offer your own gift cards. Some platforms let you add your logo to prepaid visa and mastercard cards, but once purchased, those can be spent anywhere, including at your competitors or on groceries. To truly benefit from a gift card program, you need to offer gift cards that are purchased from your business and then redeemable only at your business. This ensures you capture all the benefits of gift cards and why almost every large brand uses this closed-loop system as well.
10. Sell from one link, anywhere
Well designed software should give you a single branded sales page that works on any device and accepts the payment methods people actually use: card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and even other popular ones like Cash App Pay. Drop that link in your website’s navigation, your footer, your bio, email signatures, sms, whatsapp or your link in bio. If a customer can tap it, they can buy.
How gift card redemption actually works
Here’s where a lot of cheaper tools fall down. Selling a gift card is easy. Letting customers redeem it smoothly, across all the different ways you take payment, is the hard part, and it’s what separates real online gift card software from a glorified payment link.
Do you sell across different channels? Offer a mix of products and services? Accept on-the phone payments? However you sell – whether online, in-app, in-person or on the phone, we’ve got you covered.
The right tool meets your customers wherever they check out. With Cardivo, the same gift card can be redeemed across:
👉 To try one of the redemption demos below, first send yourself a gift card.
- WooCommerce: a free plugin adds a “Redeem a gift card” option at checkout. Try the demo
- Shopify: native redemption inside Shopify checkout, synced back in real time. Try the demo
- Stripe Checkout & payment links: for anyone selling directly through Stripe. Try the demo
- Paythen payment plans: let customers apply a gift card to their payment plan. Try the demo
- Your own app or site: via the redemption API, you control the whole experience. Read the API docs
- Eventbrite: allow customers to buy event tickets with their gift card. See setup instructions
- Zapier: connect a form or other tool to check balances and redeem with no code. Go to Zapier
- Manually: redeem in full or in part from your dashboard for phone or in-person sales.
Because it’s platform-agnostic, you’re not locked in. Switch ecommerce platforms later, add a new service, start taking phone orders: your gift card program comes with you.
Physical or digital gift cards. Which ones should you choose?
Gift cards are a proven way to boost sales and attract new customers. In the past this meant physical plastic cards – but those have some big flaws and downsides. Here’s why digital gift cards are the smarter choice for most businesses:
💸 No overheads
Digital gift cards don’t require printing, shipping, or inventory management. You avoid upfront costs and the hassle of storing or displaying physical cards. You also don’t lose any gift cards because of ‘breakage’ or even theft. This means you can start offering gift cards without tying up cash or worrying about logistics, printing, delivery and unnecessary complexity.
💌 Instant delivery and use
With digital gift cards, customers can buy and send them instantly to their friends and family anywhere—no matter where they are. This makes them ideal for last-minute gifts or for people buying from afar. Recipients can access their gift cards on their phones whenever they need them, making redemption simple and convenient.
🔒 Better security
Physical cards can be lost or stolen and are usually impossible to recover. They are also prone to fraud. Digital gift cards, on the other hand, are easy to manage via an online dashboard. If there’s an issue, you can easily verify details, balances and even deactivate them.
📱 Customers prefer digital
People increasingly expect fast, digital solutions—including when it comes to gift cards. Digital options cater to those who want to buy and give gifts without delay. They’re especially useful for buyers who leave things to the last minute – which is the majority of buyers. In fact digital gift cards now outsell physical gift cards globally.
📊 Smarter tracking
Digital gift cards make it easy to track sales, redemptions, and balances in real time. You get better data and insights, without the need for manual entry or expensive, clunky equipment.
In short, digital gift cards let you offer a modern, flexible experience to your customers with less effort and no upfront cost. If you’re looking to grow your gift card program, going digital is often the most practical and profitable approach.
How much does gift card software cost?
Gift card software pricing falls into three groups:
- Enterprise tools: usually “request a quote,” and often tens of thousands of dollars a year.
- Monthly subscriptions: a fixed fee from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month, whether or not you sell anything.
- Per-sale pricing: tools like Cardivo charge a percentage of each sale and nothing else.
Cardivo charges a flat 5% per sale, with no monthly fees and nothing upfront, and you can pass some or all of that fee on to buyers. As with almost every tool, there’s a separate payment processing fee charged directly by the payment processor (Stripe), typically 1.6% to 2.9%, which you can also pass on or split. So if you’re looking for free gift card management software, the closest thing is a tool like Cardivo: it costs nothing to set up or keep running, and you only pay a fee when you sell a gift card. See Cardivo pricing.
How fast can you actually get started?
Faster than you’d expect. With Cardivo you can be live in under 10 minutes, and you don’t even need a website. The flow looks like this:
- Create a free account (no credit card needed, ever).
- Connect Stripe (or create a Stripe account), which handles payments securely.
- Add your branding, designs, colors, and even pre-set amounts.
- Share your gift card link and start selling.
Maximize your success with gift cards
Once you’ve chosen the right tool and set it up, here are some recommendations to drive sales:
👩💻 Promote your gift cards on your site
Many of us 👀 have a tendency to set up something new in our business, but not tell anyone about it. If your customers don’t know you sell something, they can’t buy it. This is the most critical step especially when you’re just getting started with gift cards. Your customers need to know you now offer gift cards and importantly, when the next birthday or holiday comes around, they need to remember instead of defaulting to Amazon or Apple.
We recommend adding a link to your gift card sales page in your site’s main navigation, footer, as well as prominent graphic banners on your site’s home or other relevant pages. If it’s an ecommerce store, we suggest adding a block on all your product pages promoting your gift cards.
📣 Tell your customers on social
Add a link to your gift card sales page in your link in bio tools, and create promotional posts on your socials – do this at launch but also regularly on an ongoing basis. Repetition is the most effective way to convey a message. The next time your audience is looking to buy a gift card for someone close, you want them to think of your brand first.
📩 Tell your customers via email
If you have a mailing list, sending out an email letting customers know about your shiny new gift cards and if you send out regular emails, include a block promoting your gift cards each time. If your business uses email signatures, include a graphic and link there. Your easy to share sales page will work anywhere on any device, letting customers quickly buy your gift card.
🔥 Sweeten the deal to kickstart sales and during shopping seasons
To get your existing customers excited and to take immediate action, offer a limited time launch discount code to encourage customers to buy your gift card immediately – this can really help kickstart your gift card sales. And each gift card sold not only brings you immediate cash, but also leads to a likely future purchase, either from a new customer who got the gift card or from your existing customer – kicking off a virtuous cycle of more sales and new customers.
Some tools like Cardivo will let you offer discount codes easily, and to make it super-easy for all customers access discounts for a certain period, you can offer auto-applying discount codes too with just one click.
The goal with all of the above is to try and get and keep your business as the first one customers think of next time they’re considering buying a gift for someone. Promoting your gift cards can be even more effective leading up to shopping events like Black Friday or the holiday season but the most effective method is to incorporate gift cards as a sustained ongoing part of your business and all messaging. People have special occasions through the year – from birthdays and anniversaries, through to special days like mothers day, father’s day, Easter, Hanukkah, Eid, and more!
Why choose Cardivo as your gift card software?
We built Cardivo to bring the benefits of gift cards to businesses of any size. It’s designed to be easy but powerful. Using Cardivo you can deliver your customers an experience that rivals and even surpasses those offered by brands like Apple and Airbnb, all with no upfront cost and no extra admin.
We’re biased, but here’s why we think you and your customers will love using Cardivo:
- It just works: It takes less than 10 minutes to get started with Cardivo. You get a powerful, fully featured gift card program that will help you increase sales with no extra admin. You don’t even need a website.
- Redeem anywhere: Cardivo supports various redemption channels, including WooCommerce, Stripe, Paythen, manual dashboard redemptions, and more. It works wherever you do business.
- Your customers and recipients will love it: Your customers who are buying gift cards can send them now or schedule them for later, include personal messages, and pay with their preferred payment method from any device. Gift card recipients get a beautiful email and their own gift card management page with your branding to easily access and manage their gift card, see their balance, redemption history and more.
- Pricing aligned to your business: We have one simple fee —just 5% per sale, with no upfront costs or hidden fees. This means we only get paid if you do. And you can even pass on some or all of the fee to gift card buyers.
With no credit card needed or monthly fees, Cardivo is risk-free to try. Read about some more Cardivo features here.
Final thoughts
Choosing the right gift card software can significantly impact your business growth, customer loyalty, and profitability. Choose a system that is flexible, delivers a great experience, and is aligned with your business.
Cardivo offers small and medium businesses an accessible, comprehensive, and cost-effective solution to leverage gift cards effectively. By selecting software that aligns with your needs and focuses on enhancing the customer experience, your gift card program can quickly become a vital tool for sustained business success.
Ready to get started? Try Cardivo today and discover how easy and impactful gift cards can be to your business.
FAQs
Software that helps businesses manage gift cards efficiently, from creation, sending, redemption and easy management. Good gift card software should help you sell more, with minimal admin.
It's software you use to sell and manage gift cards for your business and handle all related admin: Looking up balances, redeeming in full or in part, fixing recipient emails, freezing cards, setting expiry rules and seeing reports. Cardivo includes all of this and more at no extra cost and no fixed monthly fee.
Gift card software can vary in cost. From enterprise focused tools that "require a quote" and can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year through to ones that have a fixed monthly fee ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month. Then there are gift card systems like Cardivo and Enjovia which charge a per transaction fee from 3-5%. Some tools also let you pass on this surcharge to buyers so you pay no fees. For most gift card tools, there is a separate payment processing fee that applies like Stripe. You can see Cardivo pricing here.
Cardivo is free to set up and has no monthly fees. You only pay a small fee when you sell a gift card, and you can even pass it on to the buyer. There is nothing to pay unless you're getting paid!
No. You get a shareable branded sales page that works on its own, so you can sell from a link in your Instagram bio, an email or a text message.
Yes you can. A tool like Cardivo lets you offer gift cards with all the functionality offered by Shopify's native gift cards but gives you additional functionality and flexibility. Shopify's built-in gift card functionality can be suitable for some businesses running on Shopify but it does have some limitations and also locks you in to Shopify. It also only works for Shopify orders. But what if you have other ways you do business? Like payment plans, in-person events, on the phone orders, and more? A platform-independent tool like Cardivo gives you all the benefits of Shopify's gift card functionality but also works fully independent of Shopify. Letting you easily switch ecommerce platforms in the future or just de-risk one part of your business by keeping it separate to your ecommerce platform.
Cardivo's Shopify integration works by syncing deeply with Shopify's gift card functionality so if a Cardivo gift card is redeemed in Shopify or any other channel you enable, the gift card value always remains in sync. You can try a live demo here, or read more here.
Yes it does. The Cardivo WooCommerce plugin is available to download for free. Your customers can easily redeem their gift cards on your WooCommerce store. If you're interested in using the WooCommerce plugin, just create your free Cardivo account, switch ON the WooCommerce integration in settings > integrations, and install our WordPress plugin. We have more setup instructions here.
Once you activate the plugin and add in the Cardivo access token, a new "Redeem a gift card" option will become visible at checkout on your WooCommerce store. Customers will be able to enter their gift card number and pay for any remaining balance using any existing payment methods.
If you need a hand getting set up on your WooCommerce store, we can help. Just reach out via the chat icon below.
You can have Cardivo up and running for your business in under 5 minutes. There are no ongoing or fixed monthly fees – just a small percentage when you sell a gift card.
No. Cardivo is fully digital by design: no printing, shipping, inventory or lost cards, and instant delivery to recipients.
With Cardivo, payments are processed by Stripe, and each gift card can be tracked, verified and frozen from your dashboard. There's nothing physical to lose or steal, and balances update automatically.
