A bakery owner told us her gift cards were "a PDF with a code on it". She emailed it, the recipient printed it, and when they turned up she crossed the code off a list taped under the till. It worked for eleven cards. Card twelve was spent twice, in two branches, on the same Saturday.
The platform you sell through matters less than that list. Here are the three ways to sell gift cards online, what each costs, and what the list has to become.
Three routes
A gift card platform. A service whose only job is selling and tracking gift cards, usually with a page you link to from your site. Gift Up charges 3.49% of each card sold with a $0.50 minimum per card and no monthly fee, and you attach your own card processor, whose fee comes on top. You get a hosted page, the recipient gets an email, and redemption is a lookup in their app.
Your payment provider's gift cards. If you take payments through a point-of-sale system it may sell gift cards too. Square charges a 2.5% load fee whenever money is added to a card, eGift cards are free to set up, there is no fee to redeem, and a card bought on its eGift page is processed at 2.9% plus 30 cents. The card then works at the same till the rest of your sales go through.
Your own website. Sell the card like any other product, and issue a tracked code to the recipient. On Webkio a gift card is a product whose price is the value on the card. The buyer names the recipient and writes a message at checkout; when the order is paid, a code with that balance is issued and emailed to the recipient, and the balance comes off their order at checkout with the rest kept for next time. The sale is an ordinary online payment through your own Stripe account, with the plan's percentage on it like any other sale, and there is no charge to redeem. Over the counter, or for a company buying forty at once, you issue cards yourself from Shop > Gift cards, singly or in a batch. Gift cards are on the Growth Business plan and above; the pricing page has the current figures.
Prices above are the vendors' own, read on November 4, 2026, and each links to its source.
What the list has to become
Whichever route, the thing that failed the bakery was the record, not the PDF. Four things a gift card record has to do:
- Hold a balance, not a tick. A $50 card spent on $38 of bread is a card with $12 left, and the system has to know that.
- Be checked in seconds. By staff at the till, and ideally by the customer themselves, so "how much is left on this" is not a phone call.
- Keep a history. Every redemption and every adjustment, with the order it belonged to, so a disputed card has an answer.
- Be switched off. A lost card is deactivated and reissued, not argued about.
If a platform does those four things, the fee is the next question. If it does not, the fee is irrelevant.
The page it is sold from
Gift cards are searched for by your business name in the fortnight before every gift occasion, and the page has to exist to be found. Give the card its own page, say the amounts, say how it arrives (email the same day, printed in the shop), say whether it expires, and say where it can be spent. Link it from the homepage from mid-November and from any email you send in December.
The website planner shows which pages a site in your trade carries, and a gift card page is one of the few that earns its place in a single month.
Set the policy before the first sale
Expiry, lost cards, refunds and small balances are decisions, and the law makes some of them for you. A gift card policy for a small business walks through the six, including the federal five-year rule on expiry.
Questions
Should I sell fixed amounts or let the buyer choose?
Fixed amounts sell better online, because the buyer is choosing a gift rather than doing arithmetic. Three amounts covering "small thank-you", "a visit" and "a generous present" is enough. Take any amount over the counter.
Does the recipient need an account?
No, and they should not have to make one. A code they can type at checkout is the whole requirement.
What does a gift card cost me to sell?
The platform's fee on the sale, the card processor's fee, and nothing at redemption on any of the three routes above. The real cost is the obligation: the money arrived, the work has not.
Can I sell gift cards for services rather than products?
Yes, and that is most of the market: a salon visit, a massage, a lesson. A card with a cash balance is easier than one for a named treatment, because your prices will change before it is used.