Shopify Gift Cards: Setup, Balance Checks, and the Holiday Gifting Play

Sending a Shopify gift card to someone else, with a message, on a chosen date, is a theme setting. Shopify added the recipient and scheduled send options (opens in new tab) on November 15, 2023. The feature was introduced from v9.0.0 of Shopify’s free Online Store 2.0 themes (opens in new tab) and is available in the Dawn and the Horizon family.

The parts that changed more recently carry money. Stores created on or after May 12, 2025 are charged a transaction fee on orders paid with a gift card (opens in new tab). Local currency gift cards (opens in new tab) launched on May 11, 2026, with a redemption setting you can’t change after a card is created.

We build Shopify stores and the email programs around them. This is the checklist we’d run with a client’s team before the 2026 holiday season.

Gift cards are available on all Shopify subscription plans (opens in new tab), and they’re included with Shopify (opens in new tab). A gift card is created when you fulfill an order containing a gift card product, or you can create one directly in the admin for any eligible value without taking payment.

You add gift card products from Products > Gift cards. Each denomination is saved as its own variant (opens in new tab), so you can set a SKU, barcode and image per amount. A denomination can be any amount above zero up to $10,000 USD or the local equivalent, and customers can’t input a custom amount for a gift card from your online storefront.

Shopify gift cards redeem only at the store that issued them. There’s no native way to move or transfer gift cards between stores (opens in new tab), which matters if you run separate stores per region or brand. Shopify lists six redemption channels that use Shopify checkout: Online Store, Buy Button, Facebook Shop, Messenger, Shopify POS and the Shop app.

Admin-issued cards have a lower cap. The maximum is $2,000 USD or the local equivalent (opens in new tab), and Shopify Support can raise or lower that limit (opens in new tab) after review.

The recipient form (opens in new tab) on a gift card product has four fields: recipient email, an optional recipient name, an optional message and an optional send-on date. You turn the form on in the theme editor, in the Buy buttons block of the default product template, with the checkbox labeled “Show recipient information form for gift card products.” The customization doesn’t apply to vintage themes. If the checkbox isn’t there, your theme doesn’t support the feature.

Scheduled cards go out in the morning, on the buyer’s clock. The send window is roughly 4:00 am to 10:00 am in the purchasing customer’s time zone. Two emails are involved: New gift card goes to the recipient, and Gift card receipt goes to the buyer to confirm the send.

With recipient delivery native, gift card apps for Shopify compete on the gaps in the native feature. Each claim below is the developer’s own. Gift Card Pro (opens in new tab) advertises custom amounts alongside preset denominations, video messages and bulk sending, and Gift Card Hero (opens in new tab) advertises bulk tools (import, generator, update, mass send) via CSV files, plus balance top-ups.

Govalo (opens in new tab) says its gift card emails integrate with Klaviyo, Omnisend and Drip, and Givy (opens in new tab) says it lets shoppers gift any product or subscription. Rise (opens in new tab) pitches a combined wallet for gift cards, loyalty, cashback and refunds. Across those apps, the advertised additions are:

If your theme supports the recipient form and you don’t need any of those additions, native Shopify gift cards cover the holiday use case without an app.

For Shopify stores created on or after May 12, 2025, orders that include store credit or gift cards as a payment method are charged third-party transaction fees (opens in new tab) on the amount paid for using store credit or gift cards. Stores created before that date are exempt. The fee applies to the portion of the order paid by gift card or store credit, at redemption.

The rate varies depending on your pricing plan, and the Transaction fees section of a bill shows what your store was charged. Two other rules affect the math: transaction fees don’t apply to POS orders, and the fees aren’t returned to you when you issue an order refund.

If your store was created on or after May 12, 2025, confirm what you’re charged against your bill or with Shopify before you forecast holiday redemptions.

Before May 2026, Shopify gift cards were held in the store currency and converted at checkout. That conversion uses the exchange rate at the time that the gift card is redeemed (opens in new tab), and not the exchange rate that was in place when the gift card was purchased. A customer who buys a store currency card while shopping in another currency can see its value in their currency move between purchase and redemption.

Local currency gift cards remove that float. Since May 11, 2026, a USD-based store can issue EUR, CAD, GBP, or any other market currency gift card (opens in new tab), with the value held in that currency end-to-end. Local currency gift cards are available to all stores (opens in new tab), aren’t supported on global B2B markets, and by default redeem only when the checkout currency matches the card’s currency.

You set cross-currency redemption when you create a gift card or gift card product, and you can’t change this setting after the gift card is created. Turning it on lets a card in one currency pay for a checkout in another, and you carry the exchange-rate movement.

Shopify’s own example (opens in new tab) shows the cost. You sell a $100 CAD gift card and receive a $73 USD payout, the rate later shifts so $100 CAD equals $100 USD, and the customer buys $100 USD of product, so you effectively lose $27 USD. You can turn cross-currency redemption off when you create a gift card to reduce that risk.

Local currency gift card products also need catalog work before they’ll sell. They aren’t published to sales channels or catalogs by default (opens in new tab), and a shopper in a different currency sees the price displayed as 0. If you later change your store or market currency, a card whose currency no longer matches any checkout currency might not be redeemable at checkout, even though it still shows as Active in your Shopify admin. If you’re still setting up markets and catalogs, our guide to selling internationally with Shopify Markets covers that structure.

Your customer can check the gift card balance on the gift card page (opens in new tab) of your online storefront. Customers can access this page by opening the link in the gift card email they receive. Gift card pages are hosted on the checkout.shopify.com domain (opens in new tab), not on your storefront domain.

The second customer path is Apple Wallet. Once you activate passes, the pass shows your store information, the card’s active balance and a unique QR code (opens in new tab). The third is in store: the receipt shows the last 4 digits of the card and its remaining balance (opens in new tab), and staff can scan a card with the iPad’s front-facing camera to view it.

Can a shopper type a code into your store to check a Shopify gift card balance? Apps sell a code-entry check: GoGiftCards (opens in new tab) advertises a gift card balance check using a code or email, and Gift Card Hero (opens in new tab) advertises a balance check widget. Both are the developers’ claims.

On your side, you can search Products > Gift cards by customer or by the full code (opens in new tab) without spaces, and the card’s page shows the initial balance, current balance and a timeline of orders. You can’t read the code back to the customer, because the admin shows only the last four characters. Resending the gift card email is the fix for a lost code, and a partially used card is resent with only its remaining balance.

One resend path depends on your account setup. You can resend the gift card email from the order page (opens in new tab) if you’re on new customer accounts, and this option isn’t available in legacy customer accounts. Shopify marked legacy customer accounts as deprecated (opens in new tab) on February 26, 2026.

A gift card sale doesn’t appear in your sales reports. Selling a gift card isn’t counted as a sale (opens in new tab) because it’s a liability. When the gift card is later redeemed, the full item value is counted as a sale. For example, a customer buys a $50 USD gift card and later uses it on a $50 USD item, and the $50 USD of sales is recorded when the item is purchased.

That shifts when holiday revenue lands. A gift card product sold in December is excluded from sales reports and from the total sales number on the Home analytics card, and shows up as sales in whatever month the recipient spends it. The sale of the card does appear in the Net sales from gift cards finance report, and the payment appears in the Payments finance report. Admin-created cards don’t appear in the Net sales from gift cards report at all.

The liability itself is in the Outstanding gift card balance report (opens in new tab), as its Ending gift card balance for a given date. The report has nine columns: the date, starting balance, issued, disabled, redeemed, refunded, adjustment, ending balance and net change. Shopify marks the Adjustment value column as available to Shopify Plus.

Expired and deactivated cards are treated differently in that report. An expired card’s remaining balance will continue to count toward your outstanding gift card balance, while a deactivated card’s balance is returned to zero and removed from the report, which can take up to 24 hours to display. If your finance team expects expiry to clear the liability in Shopify, it won’t.

The report has limits your accountant should know about. There isn’t a per-transaction gift card ledger report with one row for each issuance, redemption, expiration, or deactivation across cards, and aggregated finance reports don’t split gift card balances by issue method. To separate purchased cards from admin-issued ones, you use the Issue method filter on the gift cards list or the CSV export (opens in new tab). Gift card payments on imported orders also aren’t deducted from the card’s balance automatically, which is relevant after a platform migration.

Shopify notes that liabilities such as gift cards often require special treatment in accounting, so how you book the liability is a question for your accountant.

Three native constraints on created gift cards (opens in new tab) shape how your support team handles mistakes. Shopify states each one:

A card issued for the wrong amount therefore can’t be corrected in place. Your options in the admin are to deactivate it and issue a new one, or to leave it. Refunding a purchased gift card product deactivates the card automatically.

Can customers top up or reload Shopify gift cards? Cards can be reloaded during the return and exchange process (opens in new tab) when the original transaction was processed with Shopify Payments, and otherwise a new card has to be created for the refund amount. Outside that refund flow, adding funds is an API operation: the giftCardCredit mutation (opens in new tab) adds funds to an existing gift card, increasing its available balance, which means a custom build or an app.

Codes follow the same pattern of varying by surface. The 16 character gift card redemption codes (opens in new tab) are randomized and can’t be customized. POS accepts third-party printed cards with codes of 8 to 20 alphanumeric characters (opens in new tab), and the giftCardCreate mutation (opens in new tab) accepts an optional custom code.

Store credit solves the editing problem because it’s a balance on a customer account, not a code. Store credit is adjusted with credits and debits on the customer profile (opens in new tab), and Shopify suggests refunding to store credit when you don’t want a refund going back onto a deactivated card. The trade-offs are in redemption: customers can use store credit only when signed in through customer accounts or using Shop Pay, and only the full store credit amount can be applied as a payment method.

Store credit also isn’t available with legacy customer accounts (opens in new tab), can’t be used on draft or edited orders, and carries the same transaction fee as gift cards (opens in new tab) for stores created on or after May 12, 2025. For gifting, a code that anyone can redeem is the point, so gift cards stay the right tool. For refunds, goodwill credits and rewards, store credit is usually cleaner, and our guide to building an ecommerce loyalty program covers how store credit works as a building block for rewards.

Customers can use gift cards at any location or through your online store (opens in new tab), and the balance automatically updates across all sales channels. Gift cards have to be activated as a payment method in the POS app first. The type you issue, digital only or digital or physical, is set in the POS editor in the admin (opens in new tab) and applies to every device at every location.

Shopify POS has three gift card formats (opens in new tab): a digital card emailed to the customer, a paper copy from the receipt printer, and a physical card with a pre-assigned code. POS also offers a Custom gift card option for custom amounts, which the online storefront doesn’t. Physical cards come from the Shopify Hardware Store or a third-party printer with unique codes, and Hardware Store cards carry a QR code that a 1D scanner won’t read.

Online orders never produce a plastic card. An online order for a gift card product produces a digital gift card on fulfillment (opens in new tab), not a pre-printed physical card. If you’re planning physical cards for stores or pop-ups this season, that’s a POS workflow, and our guide to Shopify POS and unified commerce covers the wider setup.

Shopify’s Spring ’26 Edition added gift card cash-out on POS (opens in new tab). Shopify describes it as cashing out low-balance gift cards directly from Shopify POS to meet local redemption laws.

To cash out a gift card (opens in new tab), the gift card value must be less than $15 USD or equivalent in your local currency, and the card has to be active and unexpired. The store must use cash, and you can’t cash out gift cards to other payment methods. Staff need the Cash out gift cards permission or manager approval.

Separately, California Civil Code section 1749.5 (opens in new tab) makes a gift certificate with a cash value of less than $15 redeemable in cash, with that text effective January 1, 2026 and operative April 1, 2026. That’s one state’s rule, and yours may differ. Shopify’s gift card terms (opens in new tab) say cards must “not be redeemable for cash” unless Applicable Laws require otherwise, so whether your stores cash out is a legal question for each state you operate in.

By default, Shopify gift cards don’t expire (opens in new tab), and Shopify’s stated reason is that it’s illegal in some countries for gift cards to expire. If you set an expiry date, then by default the cards expire after five years. The setting lives at Settings > Payments > Gift card expiration and accepts a value in years, months or days, so it’ll let you set less than five years.

That five-year default is a product setting. The legal floor in the US comes from Regulation E. 12 CFR 1005.20 (opens in new tab) says no person may sell or issue a store gift card with an expiration date unless, among other conditions, the funds expire no earlier than “Five years after the date the gift certificate was initially issued, or the date on which funds were last loaded to a store gift card or general-use prepaid card.” The same section restricts dormancy, inactivity and service fees and requires the expiration terms to be disclosed on the card.

12 CFR 1005.20 (opens in new tab) excludes “A loyalty, award, or promotional gift card” from the cards it covers, but its definition of that term requires the card to be issued in connection with a loyalty, award or promotional program and to carry specific disclosures, including a statement that it’s issued for loyalty, award or promotional purposes. Whether a card you issue from the admin as a promotion qualifies is a determination for counsel. Shopify’s own suggested alternative for promotions is a discount code for a currency amount (opens in new tab), which lets you control use restrictions and expiry.

This is the federal rule only. State law can be stricter on expiry, fees and cash redemption, and it varies, so check each state you sell into. Shopify’s gift card terms (opens in new tab) leave that with you: “you are legally responsible for all gift card or store credit issuance and management; Shopify merely provides software to assist with such activities.”

Collection-scoped discounts skip gift cards. Discounts that apply to specific collections (opens in new tab) don’t apply to gift card products within the collection. A bonus-value promotion has to target the gift card product or its variants directly.

Shopify’s example is a $100 gift card discounted by $20, which costs the buyer $80 and redeems for $100. Shopify also says not to use the Compare-at price field (opens in new tab) to discount Shopify gift cards.

Risk-flagged orders don’t deliver the gift. Gift cards are fulfilled automatically when an order is paid (opens in new tab), with one exception: if an order is medium or high risk, then gift cards in that order aren’t automatically fulfilled. Those orders wait for manual fulfillment from the order page. During peak, someone needs to own that queue, because the buyer has paid and the recipient has no email.

Customized notification templates can drop the gifting fields. If you’ve modified your gift card notification templates or added new languages, then the gift card recipient information fields might not be included (opens in new tab) in your templates. The check has to be repeated for each notification language. The Apple Wallet button fails the same way: a customized template with the code removed (opens in new tab) is one cause of a missing button, and a test email sent from the admin never contains the pass.

Shopify’s issuance caps and its gift card terms don’t match. Shopify sets the product denomination maximum at $10,000 USD (opens in new tab) and says it can’t be increased. Shopify’s gift card terms (opens in new tab), last updated January 24, 2024, say you may not issue a card “in a denomination greater than $9,999 USD to a single person during any one day,” and may not redeem a card for more than $2,000 in one day. Store credit has the same split: Shopify’s stated limit is less than $15,000 USD per customer account (opens in new tab), while the terms cap it at $2,000 USD to a single person.

The admin-issued limit, the $2,000 USD maximum on issued gift cards (opens in new tab), took effect May 15, 2024, and cards issued before then weren’t affected. If you issue high-value cards for wholesale or B2B incentives, Shopify says to contact Shopify Support (opens in new tab).

Subscriptions and gift cards only partly mix. Gift cards can be applied to the first payment on an order that contains a subscription product (opens in new tab), but they can’t be used for recurring subscription payments. A gift card also can’t be used to buy another gift card, and the gift card field appears at checkout only when your store has active gift cards.

Test automatic issuance in Flow before you promise it. Shopify recommends Shopify Flow (opens in new tab), with an order trigger and an action that issues a gift card, for promotions like a gift card on orders above a set amount. The one gift card action Shopify lists for Flow (opens in new tab) is Get gift card data, which returns up to 100 cards at a time (opens in new tab). Confirm the workflow in your own Flow editor before you promise a gift-with-purchase card in a campaign.

The demand data comes from NRF’s consumer surveys for the 2025 season, and the figures are stated intentions, not measured sales. In NRF’s November 2025 survey (opens in new tab), gift cards were the second most common planned gift at 43%, behind clothing and accessories at 50%. NRF projected total gift card spending of $29.1 billion, up from $28.6 billion in 2024, with consumers planning to buy three to four cards and spend an average of $171.32 per person. That survey covered 8,000 adults from October 31 to November 6, 2025, with a margin of error of plus or minus 1.1 percentage points.

A separate question shows the receiving side. In NRF’s October 2025 holiday survey (opens in new tab) of 8,247 adults, conducted October 1 to 7, gift cards were the gift consumers most wanted to receive, at 50%. One caveat on fit for a DTC brand: in the November survey, restaurants were the most popular gift card type at 27%, followed by bank-issued cards and department stores at 25% each. The category is large, and your share of it depends on your gift card being easy to find, buy and send.

The prep is operational:

Timing matters for the first two. Because scheduled cards send in the purchasing customer’s morning (opens in new tab), a card scheduled for December 25 arrives on the buyer’s clock. And because a test email from the admin never contains the Apple Wallet pass (opens in new tab), the test has to be an actual order or a test order placed in your store. You can also schedule a publish date for a gift card product (opens in new tab), which helps if you’re launching a holiday design.

Shopify gift cards are digital products delivered by email, so a gift card order doesn’t depend on a shipping cutoff. A gift card campaign can run in the last week before the holiday, and the rest of your peak-season prep is in our Shopify Black Friday 2026 readiness checklist.

A Shopify gift card reaches its recipient by email. If the notification template is missing the message field or the Apple Wallet button, that’s the version of the gift your customer’s recipient gets.

BLKDG builds the holiday gifting campaigns and the notification emails around your Shopify gift cards, in Klaviyo and in Shopify, with one team accountable for both. See BLKDG’s email and SMS marketing services and get your free Growth Audit. It’s a free, no-obligation look at why you aren’t getting found or converting online, with a clear roadmap for how to fix it.