Gift cards are a $29 billion holiday market, and your website should take its share
Shoppers planned to spend $29 billion on gift cards last holiday season. A gift card is prepaid cash and a first visit from a new customer, and the shops that make one easy to buy online collect both.
Last holiday season, 43% of shoppers planned to buy at least one gift card, and the National Retail Federation put total planned spending at $29 billion. Gift cards ranked as the second-most popular gift, behind only clothing and accessories. If a customer cannot buy one from you in under a minute, that money goes to someone who made it easy.
Gift cards are not just a counter item for shops with a counter. A gift card is cash in your account today, in exchange for a sale you make later, to a person you may never have met.
The money shows up first
A gift card pays you before you do the work. That is the whole appeal in a slow quarter. A customer buys a card in November, and you hold the cash through the weeks when your own revenue dips.
Run the numbers with an example. Say you sell 100 cards at $50 each. That is $5,000 in your account before the new year. It is an illustration, not a forecast, but it is the right shape: the cash lands in your busiest weeks and the work lands in your quietest.
Now the honest part. A card you have sold is a liability on your books until someone redeems it, so confirm the accounting with your bookkeeper. Federal law gives the holder at least five years before the funds can expire, and state rules vary on top of that. Plan for the card to come back at any point, not just in January.
The person who redeems it spends more
The value of a card is not the face amount. Jordan Hirschfield, Director of Prepaid at Javelin Strategy & Research, described the pattern to PaymentsJournal in January 2026:
“Not only will they spend it within a month, they will spend more than the value of that card. For retailers, if it’s a $50 gift card and they’re spending $75, you’re getting uplift of spend that maybe they weren’t intending to buy.”
— Jordan Hirschfield, Director of Prepaid, Javelin Strategy & Research (2026)
Take his example at face value: a $50 card that turns into $75 of sales. Across those 100 cards, the $5,000 you were paid up front becomes $7,500 in work, and the extra $2,500 came from people who were not planning to spend it.
Javelin also found that over two-thirds of consumers received a gift card last holiday season. Most of those cards get used within a month. The ones that do not sit in a wallet: Bankrate’s 2020 survey of more than 2,600 U.S. adults found half of Americans held an unused card or store credit, averaging about $167. That is why the follow-up matters as much as the sale.
A gift card is a customer you did not have to pay to find
This is where gift cards beat most advertising. The person who redeems the card is often new to you, and they arrive with money already committed.
Hirschfield’s numbers on what happens next: “Roughly half will become a repeat customer of that brand when they get a gift card and they use it.” Four in ten join the loyalty program, and about 20% refer the business to someone else.
Compare that with what you pay to find a customer another way. A card bought by a regular, given to a friend, redeemed and followed by a good first visit is a referral you did not have to ask for.
You might be thinking this only works for retail. It does not. Landscapers, cleaners, mechanics, salons, and anyone who sells a service people give as a present can sell a card. If someone would say “get your gutters cleaned” as a gift, you can sell that.
What it takes on your side
This is where the studio’s work comes in, because the card itself is the easy part. The part that decides whether you collect your share is the system around it:
- A page that sells. A gift card option linked from your homepage and your Google Business Profile, with a form that takes a name, an amount and an email.
- Automatic delivery. The buyer picks a date, the recipient gets the card by email or text, and nobody on your team touches it.
- A reminder in January. A scheduled note to anyone holding a balance, because the follow-up is where the repeat customer comes from.
- Posts that run on their own. Instagram and LinkedIn content from now through Christmas, so the offer is in front of people while they are shopping.
The NRF’s survey also found that over-65s are the most likely to buy a gift card, at an average of $58 per card, about $5 above the average shopper. Make sure your listing and your page both show the offer, and that the phone number on them gets answered.
None of this needs a large budget. It needs to be built once, before the busy weeks, rather than improvised on December 20.
This week
The principle is simple: a gift card turns a holiday shopper into prepaid cash and a future regular, and it only works if buying one takes less than a minute.
This week, do one thing. Open your website on your phone and try to buy a gift card from your own business. If you cannot do it in under a minute, you have found the work.
Sources
- Gift cards gain popularity as top choice for holiday shoppers in 2025, National Retail Federation, December 2025
- The Best Time for Consumers to Spend Holiday Gift Cards? Now, PaymentsJournal (Javelin Strategy & Research), January 2026
- Half of Americans have unused gift cards, and it’s costing them over $21 billion, CNBC Make It (Bankrate survey), February 2020