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 is where you'll spend the whole setup: Home, Orders, Products, Customers, and so on down to Settings at the bottom.

Gift cards aren't a top-level item here; they sit inside Products, which is worth knowing 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 — you don't need either finished to create a gift card, but you do need Shopify Payments or another provider switched on before a customer can actually buy one, so it's worth sorting that out in the same session.

From the left menu, open Products and choose Gift cards. On a store that has never issued one, you'll 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: one adds a gift card product for your storefront, and one issues a card to a named customer. They lead to different flows, so decide up front whether you're stocking your store or handing a card to a particular person before you click.

Issuing a card opens the Create gift card form, and it's short by design. The Gift card code is generated for you — you can keep it or 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 regulated and varies by country — Shopify flags this right on the form.

You can attach the card to a customer so it lands in their account and email, 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 immediately.

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

Anchor your 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. Round numbers photograph and market cleanly, and a slightly premium top option gives generous gifters somewhere to go. If you sell gift cards as products rather than issuing them one by one, set these as distinct variants so shoppers pick from a clear menu instead of typing a number, and so your reporting stays clean per denomination.

A gift card sitting in your catalog earns nothing — the stores that win with 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 from early in the season, since gift cards are the classic last-minute purchase and you want to be the obvious option when someone realizes on the 22nd that they're 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. That instant-delivery angle is your strongest line in the final week, when physical products can no longer arrive in time.