Selling your own gift cards is the rare growth lever that pays you before you do the work. A customer hands over $100 today; you deliver against it later, often at a higher basket than the card covers. This guide covers the whole decision — what to sell, which platform, what it really costs, what the law says about expiry, and how to redeem without buying hardware.
It takes about thirty minutes to set up. You can be taking gift card orders today.
A gift card is a prepayment. The cash arrives now and the cost of serving it arrives later, which makes it one of the few marketing activities with a positive working capital effect rather than a negative one. It is also a customer acquisition channel that costs you nothing: the person redeeming the card is usually not the person who bought it, so every card sold puts a stranger in front of your counter with money already spent.
Two consumer research findings are worth knowing before you set your denominations. A 2024 Bankrate/YouGov survey of 2,373 US adults found 43% were holding at least one unused gift card, worth an average of $244 each — that is money already sitting in someone else’s business, and the way you get some of it is to be a business that sells cards. And First Data’s 2018 Prepaid Consumer Insights study of more than 2,000 US consumers found the average recipient spends $59 above the card’s face value. The overspend comes out of the recipient’s own pocket, at your till.
There are three things people mean by "selling gift cards", and they are not the same business. Issuing your own closed-loop cards, redeemable only with you, is the one that grows an independent business — it is a prepayment from a customer who already likes you. Selling open-loop Visa or Mastercard cards is a retail product with thin margins and network rules. Buying other brands’ cards to resell at a spread is arbitrage with inventory and fraud risk. This guide is about the first one.
Digital cards have no unit cost, no minimum order, no stock to count, and they can be bought at 11pm on Christmas Eve — which is exactly when a large share of gift card demand shows up. Physical cards still earn their place on a counter display in retail and hospitality, but they mean a print run, a per-card cost, and a rack. Starting digital and adding print later if the volume justifies it is the cheaper order to do it in.
Compare four things, in this order: the fee per sale, whether there is a monthly fee, whether redemption requires their hardware, and who holds the money between purchase and payout. That last one is the one platforms are quietest about. If a provider takes the payment into their own account and settles with you days later, you have financed their float with your Christmas revenue.
Three or four fixed amounts plus a custom field covers almost every buyer. For a café, $15/$25/$50 works; for a salon or spa, price the amounts against real services — $75 buys a cut, $150 buys colour — because a buyer who can see what the card gets is a buyer who does not hesitate. Allow partial redemption. A customer with $18 left on a card comes back to spend it, and usually spends over it.
One link does the work of a website. Instagram bio, Google Business Profile, email signature, order confirmations, a QR code taped by the till, the hold music message. The businesses that sell gift cards well are rarely the ones with the best gift card page — they are the ones whose link is in six places instead of one.
When the recipient walks in, look up their code, take the amount off the bill, and let the system track the balance. Any device with a browser is enough. Insist on this when you compare platforms: gift card redemption that requires a specific terminal converts a software decision into a hardware purchase.
Most gift card comparisons stop at the percentage. The more consequential difference is structural: when a customer buys a $100 gift card, whose account does that $100 enter first? On a lot of platforms the answer is theirs. The payment goes into the provider’s balance and reaches you on their payout schedule — which means in the two weeks a year when gift card volume is highest, your cash is sitting somewhere you cannot spend it.
Shopolo is built the other way round, deliberately. Every gift card sale is a Stripe Connect direct charge routed with transfer_data.destination pointed at the merchant’s own connected Stripe account. The money is the merchant’s from the moment the customer pays. Shopolo never holds customer funds, never touches card details, and could not delay your payout if it wanted to — there is no float to delay. The platform fee comes off as an application_fee_amount deducted from your settlement, so the customer pays a clean $100 for a $100 card. No surcharge, no rounding, no “convenience fee” on the checkout page.
Every platform charges on two axes, and a headline number on one axis usually hides a charge on the other. “No monthly fee” generally means a higher per-sale percentage; a low percentage often means a subscription, or hardware, or a paid add-on for the loyalty program you also wanted. Work out your monthly gift card volume and multiply it out before you choose.
Competitor figures are taken from each provider’s own published pricing pages and are subject to change — check them before you decide. Card processing is charged separately by the processor in every case, including Shopolo’s.
Shopolo’s platform fee is 2.5% on Starter, 1.5% on Growth and 0.9% on Pro, taken from your settlement rather than added to the customer’s price. US plans start at $19/month and gift cards are included on every plan, alongside loyalty, a QR menu and customer CRM. The 30-day free trial needs no credit card, and the platform fee is waived entirely while the trial runs — gift cards you sell in your first month cost you nothing but Stripe’s processing.
Setting up the cards is thirty minutes. Selling them is distribution. Six places, none of which cost money:
Timing matters more than copy. The bulk of gift card buying happens between mid-November and Christmas Eve, with secondary peaks at Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. If you launch in October, you are in position for the one window that matters. There is a longer treatment of promotion and seasonal timing in our guide to selling gift cards online.
Closed-loop gift cards — the kind you issue for your own business — are lightly regulated compared with open-loop prepaid cards, but the US federal rules are firm. The Credit CARD Act of 2009 prohibits store gift cards from expiring less than five years after funds were last loaded, and prohibits dormancy or inactivity fees until a card has been unused for at least twelve months, with disclosure requirements attached. A number of states go further; some effectively bar expiry on closed-loop cards altogether, and most have unclaimed property rules governing what happens to balances that are never redeemed.
The practical version for a small business: do not set a short expiry, do not charge inactivity fees, state your terms plainly at the point of sale, and check your own state’s escheatment rules if you accumulate a meaningful balance of unredeemed cards. Shopolo cards carry no mandatory expiry date; you can add one in the dashboard where local law expects it. This is general information, not legal advice — for anything material, ask an accountant or attorney in your state.
Accounting-wise, a gift card sale is deferred revenue, not revenue, until it is redeemed. Your bookkeeper will want to see the liability tracked. Shopolo’s dashboard keeps outstanding balances visible so that number is not a guess at year end.
These two phrases get searched interchangeably and they describe opposite businesses. Worth being clear which one you are actually after before you go further.
If your goal is more revenue from the customers you already have, you want the first column. Shopolo does the first column.
Shopolo is a commerce platform for independent businesses — restaurants, cafés, salons, spas, studios and shops. Gift cards are included on every plan, and they sit alongside the rest of the toolkit rather than in a silo: a gift card buyer becomes a CRM record, can be enrolled in your loyalty program, and can be emailed by a campaign later. There is no hardware to buy and nothing to install.
Your gift cards live at shopolo.app/your-business alongside your ordering, booking and menu tabs. One link to share, working on any phone.
Customers pay through Stripe Checkout. Shopolo never sees a card number, and the funds route straight to your own Stripe account.
Look up a code in the dashboard and mark it redeemed. Partial redemptions keep a running balance automatically.
Every buyer lands in your customer list. Pair gift cards with loyalty stamps and email campaigns and one holiday sale becomes a regular.
Pick a platform that issues digital gift cards, create two or three denominations, connect a payment processor so money reaches your bank, and share the purchase link. On Shopolo the sequence is: sign up, connect Stripe, add your amounts, and publish your storefront at shopolo.app/your-business. There is no hardware to order and nothing to install, so a business that starts in the morning can take a gift card order the same afternoon.
No. A hosted storefront link is enough, and for most independent businesses it works better than a website page because you can paste it into an Instagram bio, a Google Business Profile, an SMS, or a QR code on the counter. Shopolo gives you a branded storefront at shopolo.app/your-business-name whether or not you have a site of your own.
Two costs apply on every platform: the card processing fee, and the platform’s own cut. Shopolo’s platform fee is 2.5% on Starter, 1.5% on Growth, and 0.9% on Pro, taken out of your settlement rather than added to the customer’s price, with Stripe’s standard processing charged separately. Paid plans start at $19/month in the US and every paid plan includes gift cards; the free plan does not, since it takes no payments at all. The platform fee is waived during the 30-day free trial.
That depends entirely on the platform, and it is the question most worth asking. Many gift card and POS providers take the payment into their own account and settle with you on a delay. Shopolo does not: payments are Stripe Connect direct charges routed with transfer_data.destination, so the funds land in the merchant’s own Stripe account. Shopolo never holds your money and never sees the customer’s card details.
In the United States, the federal CARD Act of 2009 bars store gift cards from expiring less than five years from the date funds were last loaded, and bars inactivity fees until a card has gone unused for at least twelve months. Several states are stricter and some prohibit expiry outright. Shopolo cards have no mandatory expiry date; you can set one in the dashboard where your local law requires it.
Selling gift cards for your business means issuing your own closed-loop cards redeemable only with you — a prepayment from a customer, no licence needed in most places. Becoming a gift card reseller means buying and reselling other brands’ cards at a margin, which is a different business entirely: you carry inventory risk, fraud risk, and in many US states a money transmitter licence requirement. If your goal is more revenue from your own customers, you want the first one.
Not with Shopolo. Redemption is a code lookup in your dashboard from any phone, tablet, or laptop, and partial redemptions are tracked automatically so a $100 card spent $32 at a time keeps its running balance. Several competing gift card products tie redemption to their own POS terminal, which is the point at which a cheap-looking program starts costing hardware money.
Physical cards still sell well from a counter display in retail and hospitality, but they carry a per-unit print cost, a minimum order, and stock you have to manage. Digital has neither and can be bought at 11pm on 24 December, which is when a meaningful share of gift card demand actually appears. Starting digital and adding print later if the volume justifies it is the lower-risk order.
Side-by-side breakdowns of fees, hardware requirements and included features against the platforms most often shortlisted for gift cards.
30-day free trial, no credit card required, no hardware, no platform fee during the trial. Money goes straight to your own Stripe account.
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