Ecommerce ops / Gifting
Gifting Features That Lift Holiday Sales
// gift-buyers shop differently, so sell to them differently
By Fracto Solutions
October 29, 2026
The short answer
During the holidays, a large share of shoppers are buying for someone else, and they have different needs: gift messages, gift wrapping or presentation, scheduled delivery to arrive on the right day, clear shipping cutoffs, and easy returns for the recipient. Add these gifting features and you capture occasions you’d otherwise lose, plus digital gift cards rescue last-minute buyers.
Why do gift-buyers need different features?
Because the person paying is not the person receiving, which breaks several assumptions a normal checkout makes. The buyer needs to say something, control when it arrives, know it will make the date, and know the recipient can exchange it without involving them.
The scale of the occasion is worth stating with a real number rather than a vague one. NRF and Prosper put average planned 2025 winter-holiday spending at about $890 per person, though note that figure covers gifts, food, decorations and other seasonal items together rather than isolating gifts. On gift cards specifically, 43% of shoppers planned to buy at least one, with about $29bn in expected US spending.
A store built only for self-purchase does not fail loudly during this period; it just converts worse than it should, because the buyer cannot do the things a gift purchase requires. That is a hypothesis worth testing on your own data rather than a measured fact, and we would rather frame it that way than claim a loss nobody has quantified.
What gifting features should I add first?
A gift message, scheduled delivery, prominent shipping cutoffs, and a returns path the recipient can use without the receipt. Wrapping is nice and rarely decisive. The priorities below are our recommendation, not a measured ranking, and we have flagged the one row where real data exists.
Feature
Our priority
Evidence
Gift message at checkout
High
Practitioner judgment; no published ranking exists
Scheduled or send-on delivery
High
Native to Shopify gift cards via the recipient form
Clear shipping cutoff dates
High
Practitioner judgment; late shopping is documented, missed cutoffs are not
Recipient-friendly returns or exchange
High
22% of consumers needed to return a holiday gift, up from 16%; about 8 in 10 wanted a gift card for it (BHN)
Gift wrapping or packaging
Medium
Practitioner judgment
Only the returns row has published data behind it, and it is the row most stores treat as an afterthought.
That returns finding deserves a second look, because it inverts the usual priority order. BHN found that 22% of consumers needed to return a holiday gift, up from 16% a year earlier, and that about 8 in 10 of those wanted a gift card as the outcome. Offering store credit as a first-class return option keeps the revenue in your store and gives the recipient the thing they have said they want.
How do digital gift cards help at the holidays?
They stay available after physical shipping stops, and they are genuinely popular rather than a fallback. Just do not describe them as the only option left once the cutoff passes, because that is not true and shoppers know it.
Holiday shopping runs late. NRF and Prosper, surveying 8,005 US adults between December 1 and 10, 2025, found consumers had completed just over half their holiday shopping by early December, and projected 158.9 million Super Saturday shoppers. That is evidence of late shopping. It is not evidence about missed shipping deadlines, which nobody publishes, so we have stopped asserting a figure for it.
What the data does support is demand: BHN reported that 49% of US consumers bought a digital gift card in the 2024 holiday season, up five points year on year, and observed that Boomers were about twice as likely as younger generations to buy digital gift cards at the last minute. After your cutoff, an emailed gift card is one of the few remaining options alongside in-store pickup, local delivery, expedited carriers and other digital products. Promote it as one of several, and the message survives contact with a shopper who was going to use click-and-collect anyway.
The setup detail matters here more than usual. A digital gift card only “arrives on the day” if the recipient-information form is enabled, with its send-on date. The steps are in setting up gift cards.
How do I handle shipping cutoffs and gift-buyer anxiety?
Publish the dates early, repeat them where the decision happens, and give a clear alternative once each one passes. Timing is one real friction among several, and it is the one you can remove with information rather than discounts.
Put your cutoff dates on the product page and in the cart, not only on a shipping policy page. State them per method, by delivery date rather than dispatch date, and update them as each passes so the page never shows a date that has gone. When a cutoff expires, swap the message for the alternatives, with the gift card first.
We have previously called timing anxiety the biggest gift-buyer friction. We should not rank it, because nobody has measured the ranking, and the one ranked driver we can find points elsewhere: BHN found 74% of consumers said buying gift cards helped them stick to their holiday budget, and 59% said receiving one eased post-holiday financial stress. Budget control, not timing, is the strongest documented motivation in that dataset. Both are worth addressing, and a gift card happens to serve each.
Measure the season like a campaign rather than a vibe. Track gift-message attach rate, scheduled-delivery usage, gift-card share of orders by week, and the redemption lag into January and February, since that is when a December liability becomes revenue. Then compare the basket at redemption with your store average, which is the only honest way to know whether the overspend effect the industry quotes is real in your own store.
We build the gifting path so holiday gift-buyers actually convert.
We add the gift messages, scheduling, wrapping, and prominent shipping cutoffs that gift-buyers need, push digital gift cards as deadlines approach to catch last-minute demand, and reduce timing anxiety with clear communication, then measure the seasonal lift.
It’s the same measurement-first approach behind our ecommerce operations and conversion optimization work, where we rebuild the buying path and measure the result .
// we would rather show up in your reporting than in your inbox
Frequently asked questions
What gifting features matter most during the holidays?
A gift message, scheduled or send-on delivery, prominent shipping cutoffs, and a returns path the recipient can use alone. We rank those as high priority from practice rather than from a published study. The one with hard data is returns: BHN found 22% of consumers needed to return a holiday gift and about 8 in 10 of them wanted a gift card for it.
Are digital gift cards the only option after the shipping cutoff?
No, and claiming so undercuts you. In-store pickup, local delivery, expedited carriers and other digital products are all still available. What is true is that digital gift cards are widely bought: 49% of US consumers bought one in the 2024 holiday season, up five points year on year, and older shoppers in particular buy them late.
Is gift wrapping worth offering?
It helps and it is rarely the deciding factor. We would put gift messaging, scheduled delivery, cutoff clarity and recipient returns ahead of it. That is a judgment call rather than a measured ranking, so if wrapping is cheap for you to offer, test it rather than taking our word for it.
How do I reduce gift-buyer anxiety about timing?
Publish cutoff dates by delivery date and per shipping method, show them on the product page and in the cart rather than only in a policy page, and replace each one with the live alternatives as it passes. Scheduled gift-card delivery also lets a late buyer pick the arrival date themselves.
Sources
Shopify Help Center, “Gift card products.” Product documentation. Supports only the mechanics: that you “activate gift cards on your store to sell gift card products, as well as create gift cards directly from your Shopify admin,” with no third-party app, and that Shopify stores and redeems the balance at checkout. It carries no market, behavioral or accounting data, so we do not cite it for any. Shopify Help: gift card products
Shopify Help Center, “Add gift card recipient fields.” The actual recipient mechanic: the recipient email, recipient name, message and “Send on” date fields are enabled in the theme editor under the Buy buttons block (“Show recipient information form for gift card products”), and are native to Online Store 2.0 themes from version 9.0.0. Without it, the gift-card notification goes to the purchasing customer, not the recipient. Shopify Help: gift card recipient fields
NRF with Prosper Insights & Analytics, Super Saturday release (n = 8,005 US adults, fielded December 1 to 10, 2025). Consumers had completed just over half (51%) of their holiday shopping by early December, with 158.9 million expected to shop on Super Saturday. This measures late shopping, not missed shipping cutoffs, which nobody publishes. NRF Super Saturday shopper data
NRF with Prosper Insights & Analytics, 2025 winter holiday gift-card data. 43% of shoppers planned to buy at least one gift card, with about $29bn in expected US gift-card spending. Consumer survey, not transaction data. NRF on gift card popularity for 2025 holidays
Blackhawk Network (BHN), post-2024-holiday US survey (sample size not disclosed by BHN). 49% of consumers bought digital gift cards in the 2024 holiday season, up 5 points on 2023; 74% said gift cards helped them stick to their holiday budget; 22% needed to return a holiday gift, up from 16% in 2023, and about 8 in 10 of those wanted gift cards for returns. BHN research on gift card holiday demand
Blackhawk Network (BHN), gift card research published June 8, 2026 (n = 2,138 US adults 18+, fielded January 2026). Nearly 60% said they would spend beyond a card’s original value, by an average of $73; 77% planned to buy gift cards in 2026; and purchasing gift cards for their own use rose from 31% in 2025 to 56% in 2026. Self-reported survey data from a gift-card company. BHN research on gift card momentum
Revenue recognition: ASC 606-10-55-46 to 55-49 (breakage and unexercised rights). A gift-card sale is a contract liability, not revenue. Where the entity expects to be entitled to breakage, it is recognized in proportion to the pattern of rights exercised; where it does not, breakage is recognized only when further redemption becomes remote. Under 55-49, amounts that state escheat law requires to be remitted are recognized as a liability rather than revenue. RevenueHub on gift card breakage