Shopify Gift Cards: What You Owe on Every Card Sold

A gift card is the only thing in your catalogue that costs nothing to make, ships instantly, and gets paid for weeks before you deliver it. That is exactly why it deserves more thought than the toggle it looks like: the money arrives now and the obligation stays open for years, sometimes for longer than your store keeps the customer.

Shopify documents the mechanics well and then stops at the interesting part. Its own pages say the laws vary by region and send you to a local expert; they say nothing at all about what an unredeemed balance is on your books, or which US states can eventually claim it. This guide fills that gap for merchants — what to switch on, what you owe, and where the platform stops.

The Quick Verdict

Find your row first; the rest of this page is the arithmetic and the statute text underneath it.

A Gift Card Is Cash You Owe, Not Revenue You Earned

Most merchants meet gift cards as a marketing idea and book them as sales. That is the one mistake that compounds, because it inflates the month you sell and leaves nothing behind for the month you deliver. The honest model is simpler and slightly uncomfortable: you are holding someone else's money until they choose to spend it.

What happens on your books the moment a card sells

Under US GAAP, recording the cash a customer pays for a card as a liability rather than as revenue is the standard treatment, and it is worth reading in the words of an accounting firm rather than in ours.

Put numbers on it. Say you sell 120 cards at $75 over a holiday season and, by the time you look again in spring, your own records show 60% of that face value has been spent. The middle figure is the only one that belongs in your revenue; the third is the one your accountant needs.

The 60% in that example is an illustration, not a benchmark — you will replace it with your own figure further down the page. What the split shows is the mechanism: redemption, not the sale, is what turns a gift card into revenue, and the gap between the two lines is money sitting in your account that is not yours to spend on inventory.

The share nobody ever redeems

Some cards are never spent. The revenue standard has a name for it and a rule for it: customers may not exercise all of their contractual rights, and those unexercised rights are often referred to as breakage. Where an entity expects to be entitled to a breakage amount, it recognises that amount as revenue in proportion to the pattern of rights the customer does exercise — or when the likelihood of the customer exercising the rest becomes remote.

That is the part with an answer. The part without one is the number: no independent breakage rate with a disclosed methodology turned up in our search, and the figures circulating in vendor marketing arrive with no sample size, no time window and no holdout (see “What we looked for and did not find” below). This is why the calculator further down this page asks for your redemption share instead of assuming one.

A loyalty program raises the mirror-image question — there, you issue an obligation without receiving any money, which is why its break-even maths runs the other way round. That economics, and the calculator that goes with it, lives in our guide to running a Shopify loyalty program; here the money is already in the bank.

Gift Card, Store Credit or Discount Code?

Merchants tend to use these three words interchangeably, and then discover at the worst moment that the platform does not. The distinctions below are all documented, and each one has bitten someone: a customer who cannot spend store credit because they never signed in, a B2B buyer who cannot see gift cards at all, a subscriber whose second payment fails.

Built from Shopify's gift card product documentation and its store credit documentation, read August 2026. Rows describe what those pages state.

The practical rule: use store credit when you are settling with an existing customer, and a gift card when you are selling to anyone. Store credit attaches to a customer account rather than to a code, which is what makes it a poor gift and a tidy goodwill balance — and the timing of getting money back to a customer at all is a separate subject, answered in how long a Shopify refund takes.

A discount code belongs in a different conversation entirely. It never becomes a liability, because nothing is owed to anybody — you simply collect less at the till. If you are weighing a gift-card push against a promotion, the promotional side of that decision sits in our guide to Shopify discounts.

What the Native Feature Does, and Where It Stops

There are two separate gates here, and merchants routinely collapse them into one. The first is whether your plan gives you the feature at all. The second — a different question with different answers — is whether the feature actually appears where you sell. Get the first one out of the way, then read the second carefully.

Which plans include gift cards?

The corpus of Shopify advice online disagrees with itself here, and some of it says gift cards start at Basic. The official wording says otherwise, on more than one page: gift cards are available to sell on all Shopify subscription plans.

Starter is the plan that usually falls out of these lists, so it is worth checking directly. Its plan page enumerates what Starter does not get — staffing, grouping products into collections, templates, third-party carrier shipping and the POS Pro subscription — and gift cards do not appear on that list. One caveat that has nothing to do with cards: that same page states Starter is not available to new stores.

What needs an app, and what the docs don't cover

The table below is the honest inventory: what the pages we read say the platform does, and where each statement runs out. Two rows deserve attention before you plan a campaign — conditional redemption, and the currency behaviour that can leave a customer holding a balance they cannot spend at your checkout.

Read from Shopify's gift card product documentation, its point-of-sale gift card pages and the Gift Card REST resource on shopify.dev, August 2026. Where a page says nothing about a job, the row says so rather than inferring. The channels where cards are switched off or absent are a separate question, answered in the next section.

If either of the last two rows is your use case, you are shopping for an app or for developer time — the two apps whose pricing we could verify, and the one we could not, are compared further down.

The same card at the counter

One balance works online and in the room, which is the whole appeal for a store with a till. The tier question answers itself: “Sell and redeem gift cards” is marked as included both with all paid plans and with POS Pro. Pro earns its money on exchanges, pickup in store, local delivery and ship-to-home, not on gift cards.

The physical card is where the counter and the website part company. Shopify's point-of-sale gift card documentation states that online orders are not automatically linked to the QR code or barcode of a specific physical card, so pre-printed cards are issued only through Shopify POS. If your plan was to sell plastic online and post it out, that is the sentence to plan around. The wider mechanics of running a counter — hardware, staff permissions, omnichannel workflows — belong to our Shopify retail guide.

The Four Places a Gift Card Quietly Doesn't Work

None of these four is a bug, and none of them is announced to you at the moment it matters. Each is documented somewhere else in the Help Center, which is why merchants usually meet them through a customer complaint rather than through a settings page.

The pattern worth internalising: availability and visibility are different questions. Your plan can include gift cards while your B2B buyers never see one, and your POS can support them right up to the moment the connection drops. Check the second gate against the channels you actually sell through before you advertise a card.

Which Gift-Card Lane Are You In?

By now you know what the platform does and where it stops. What you do next depends far less on your catalogue than on facts you already know about your own business — and the five questions below ask for exactly those.

They cover where you sell, where the issuing business is registered, what your books already do with the balances, what you need beyond a plain sell-and-spend program, and when the store was created. The statute detail behind each lane, and the app and migration answers, come in the sections after this one — the quiz points you at the one you actually need.

Expiry Is a Legal Question, Not a Setting

This is the section Shopify does not write, and it says so itself. Its documentation acknowledges that the rules differ and then hands the question straight back to you — which is honest, and also leaves the average merchant exactly where they started.

What Shopify does if you never touch the setting

The default is not an accident, and the reason Shopify gives is the clearest signal in its documentation that this is a compliance decision wearing the clothes of a setting.

The same page states that if you do set an expiry date, the cards expire after five years by default, and that you can change the length. It also carries a caution asking you to verify that you are following the rules and regulations for gift cards in your country before changing the setting. Five years is Shopify's default, not a legal safe harbour — in some places it is generous, and in others it is unlawful.

Where you can't set an expiry date at all

Seven jurisdictions, each with its own rule and its own scope — four read from the statute itself, three from the regulator or the government's own published answer. Start with the row for where the issuing business is registered, then ask counsel whether the rules where your customers are also reach you — these are the jurisdictions we read, not a complete map.

Four rows are statute text; Ontario is a government consumer guide, Australia a regulator's guidance page and the United Kingdom a Hansard answer. All read in August 2026, each row linked to its own source. Scope differs by row: read the one that matches where the issuing business is registered, and confirm it with counsel before setting a policy.

The federal rule has a wider exception list than most summaries admit. Six categories fall outside the protection of Regulation E §1005.20 entirely:

• cards usable solely for telephone services;
• cards that are reloadable and not marketed or labelled as a gift card or gift certificate;
• loyalty, award or promotional gift cards;
• cards not marketed to the general public;
• cards issued in paper form only;
• cards redeemable solely for admission to events or venues at a particular location or group of affiliated locations.

The same section restricts dormancy, inactivity and service fees rather than the term itself: such a fee may not be imposed unless all three of the regulation's conditions hold — there has been no activity in the one-year period ending on the date the fee is charged, the fee's amount, its frequency and the fact that inactivity triggers it are stated clearly and conspicuously on the card, and no more than one such fee is imposed in any calendar month.

One boundary worth stating plainly, because it is the assumption most likely to be wrong: we found no single EU-wide rule setting a minimum term for gift cards. The searching behind that sentence, and its date, are in the block at the end of the next section; Ireland's five-year rule in the table above is national law, not a European one, and it does not transfer to a neighbouring member state.

When your state can claim the unredeemed balance

This is the part of the topic with the widest gap between what merchants assume and what the statutes say. “Unclaimed property” law — escheatment — is where a state claims dormant balances held by a business, and gift cards are treated very differently from one state to the next. Two of the five below exempt them; three do not.

Statute text read in August 2026, each row linked to its own source. These five were chosen to show the contrast, not to cover the country — the other states differ, and the parameter they differ on is described below.

The five above are a deliberate contrast, not a map of the country. If your state is not here, the useful question is a single one: does its unclaimed property act exclude gift cards from the definition of property? Where the answer is no, the two numbers that decide your exposure are the dormancy period and the share of the face value treated as abandoned — three years and 60% in North Carolina, but only for cards bearing an expiry date, and five years and the full amount in New York.

Three details decide what any of this costs you. First, North Carolina's condition is one you control rather than one your state fixes: the rule applies to cards bearing an expiry date, so leaving Shopify's expiry default alone is what keeps your cards outside it. Second, Delaware carries a smaller exemption the table leaves out on purpose — cards originally issued at $5.00 or under — because it is not general: the statute ties it to a class of issuer it defines by reference to §2906 of Title 30, which we did not read. Third, none of the statutes we read mentions revenue recognition at all — the accounting treatment and the escheatment clock live in different documents, run on different calendars, and satisfying one says nothing about the other.

Put your own numbers on it

The calculator opens on this article's worked example and then bends to your store. Change the redemption share to whatever your own sales and redemption records show — that input is deliberately yours, because our August 2026 search turned up no trustworthy industry figure to fill it for you.

Pick the state where the issuing business is registered, and say whether your cards carry an expiry date; two of the five statutes turn on that answer alone.

What It Costs You When Someone Pays With a Card

There are two moments to think about, and they behave differently. When a customer buys the card, you are taking a normal payment and paying whatever your gateway charges for it. When a customer spends the card, no gateway is involved at all — and that is precisely the case Shopify addressed with a dated rule.

Shopify extended third-party transaction fees to gift-card-funded orders for newer stores, in identical wording on its gift card and store credit pages: for stores created on or after May 12, 2025, orders that include gift cards as a payment method are charged third-party transaction fees on the order amount paid for using a gift card. The waiver is narrow — the Shopify Plus plan with Shopify Payments activated. The rate is the same third-party transaction rate your plan already carries; the per-plan numbers, the waivers and the arithmetic of choosing a gateway belong to our guide to Shopify payment gateways.

When You Need an App, and What Happens to Old Balances

Most stores never need either. If you are one of the ones that does, the useful question is not “which gift-card app is best” — nobody publishes a neutral comparison, and the vendors that rank for that query wrote most of the results. The useful question is what job you are buying.

What the two verified apps add

Both listings below were read in August 2026, and app pricing moves faster than anything else on this page. Treat the figures as a starting point to verify, not as a quote, and check the current listing before you budget.

Prices read from each app's Shopify App Store listing in August 2026. This is not a ranking: we list the apps whose pricing we could verify and what each one adds, and leave the choice to your volume and your requirement.

Two things to hold on to. First, the pricing models are not comparable at a glance — a percentage of gift-card volume is cheap while volume is small and expensive when the program works. Second, an app does not change the accounting or the escheatment position; the balance is still yours to owe and, in three of the five states above, still yours to report.

Balances you already sold on another platform

This is where replatforming projects lose a weekend. Products, customers and orders have documented import paths; live gift-card balances do not, and a customer holding a card from your old store does not care which platform you moved to.

What is documented is the API. The GraphQL giftCardCreate mutation names its required access as the write_gift_cards scope, and the REST resource adds that you need to contact Shopify Support to request the write_gift_cards and read_gift_cards scopes. That is an approval gate, not a plan gate: community posts report that in practice the scope goes to custom or private apps on Plus, but no official page we read states that, so treat the plan question as unconfirmed and the Support request as the documented step.

Practically, that leaves three routes: re-issue balances through the API with developer help, use an app that offers a migration path, or honour old cards manually against a spreadsheet while the new program runs clean. The rest of the replatforming sequence — what imports, what does not, and in what order — is in our Shopify migration guide.

Set These Before Your First Card Sells

The order matters more than it looks. Expiry comes first because in several jurisdictions it is not your decision, and because changing it later changes a promise you have already made to people holding cards.

Steps one to three apply to everyone. If the quiz routed you to the books lane, do step five before step two — the balance you already hold is the number every other decision leans on. If it routed you to an app, price the gap at step four, before you commit to a launch date. If your jurisdiction settled the expiry question for you, step one is a five-minute confirmation rather than a debate.

The Bottom Line

After eight thousand words about debt, statutes and fees, it is worth naming what you are protecting. A gift card is one of the few things you get paid for before you have to deliver it, the feature is native on every Shopify subscription plan, and selling your first one costs you no app. That is a genuinely good deal — which is exactly why it is worth handling the obligation properly rather than avoiding the product.

The technical decision is easy and the platform makes it easy. The decisions that cost money are the ones that look administrative: the setting you switch without checking your jurisdiction, the balance nobody records, the channel where the card never appears.

Frequently Asked Questions