How to Set Up Gift Cards in Shopify | Boost Holiday Sales | Easily 2026

Everything starts from the admin dashboard, the screen you land on after logging in at your store's admin URL. The left-hand menu holds Home, Orders, Products, Customers, and the rest down to Settings.

Gift cards are not a top-level item here. They sit inside Products, which matters because the natural instinct is to hunt for them under Discounts or Marketing.

If your store is new, you'll also see prompts to choose a theme and activate payments. Neither has to be finished before you create a gift card, but a customer cannot pay for one until Shopify Payments or another provider is switched on, so handle that in the same session if you intend to sell cards instead of handing them out one at a time.

From the left menu, open Products and choose Gift cards. On a store that has never issued one, you land on an empty Gift cards page headed "Start selling gift cards," with a short line explaining that you can create products customers buy or issue cards directly to specific people.

This one page is the home for the whole program: every card you create shows up here with its remaining balance and status, which is what lets you audit redemptions later instead of guessing. Two buttons matter, and they lead to different flows.

Add a gift card product puts a card on your storefront for anyone to buy. Issue a gift card creates a single card for one named person, more like handing over a store credit than stocking a product. Decide which one you want before you click, since starting the wrong flow is the single most common source of confusion in this feature.

Issuing a card opens the Create gift card form, which is short by design. The gift card code is generated for you, though you can type your own for something memorable in a promotion.

Initial value is the starting balance: enter a whole amount like 25.00 and remember this is real money the moment the card is active. Expiry date defaults to "Doesn't expire," which is the safest choice in most regions since gift-card expiration is restricted by law in many countries and Shopify flags this on the form itself.

You can attach the card to a customer so it lands in their account and inbox, or leave it unassigned. Add a note if you want a record of why it was issued. Save, and the card is live and spendable at checkout right away.

Once the mechanics work, the money question is what denominations to offer. Fixed amounts convert better than an open field: a gift buyer staring at a blank box hesitates, while a row of tidy choices makes the decision for them.

Anchor the options around your typical order value. If most orders land near 40 dollars, offering 25, 50, and 100 nudges buyers upward without pushing casual shoppers away.

A slightly premium top option gives generous gifters somewhere to go. If you are selling gift cards as products instead of issuing them one by one, set these amounts up as distinct variants so shoppers pick from a clear menu instead of typing a number, and so your sales reports stay clean per denomination.

A gift card sitting unpromoted in your catalog earns nothing. Stores that get real revenue from them treat the card as a headline product for a few weeks, not a footnote.

Feature it on the homepage and in the main navigation early in the season: gift cards are the classic last-minute purchase, and you want to be the obvious option when someone realizes on the 22nd that they are short a present. Put it in your holiday email, mention it at checkout as an add-on, and lean on the one thing a gift card does that nothing else in your store can. It delivers instantly, with no shipping cutoff, which is your strongest line in the final week once physical products can no longer arrive on time.