GiftCard Partners Blog

It’s always good news to hear that the reward you are presenting to your employees or loyalty program participants is still the strong choice. A new study released by First Data called “Consumer Insights Gift Card Survey Results”, announced that “prepaid gift cards are still a popular choice for gifts in the United States”. This is good news for those purchasing gift cards in bulk as you know you are making a good choice. Other indications that gift cards remain a strong trend in the B2B market is the study’s conclusion that more consumers are reloading their gift cards. This means that consumers (your employees and rewards participants) are loyal to their cards, be-it a physical plastic card, eCert (virtual gift card) or mCert (mobile gift card). It’s also nice to know that by participating in the B2B gift card market, we are infusing the economy with additional shopping dollars. Consumers are inclined to stand by the gift card and reload it, which increases sales opportunities for retailers. The First Data study also announced that “35% of those who reloaded closed-loop gift cards said they visited the store more often, and 20% said they spent more money during each visit”. All good news for our economy, but re-loadable and technology based gift cards are also great for our environment.
Check out our Are Gift Cards Going Green? Blog. The full study is available at
First Data’s website.

QR Codes, originally created in 1994 by the Japanese corporation Denso-Wave, have become a ubiquitous tool in modern marketing. They effortlessly bridge the gap between physical and digital realms, allowing businesses to deliver messages, coupons, gift cards, or direct links to websites. As their usage continues to rise, let’s explore some innovative ways QR Codes can engage customers and promote products.

This post might look familiar to you; we've added an update further down the page. Wikipedia outlines a “Virtual Wallet” as a hybrid checking/savings account with 3 components: a "Spend" account (checking), a "Reserve" account (backup checking, incurs interest), and a"Growth" account (savings). This is a pretty narrow view of a virtual wallet (note to self, update Wikipedia).

Virtual wallets are cropping up not just from banks for online banking; they are being offered by credit card companies, SmartPhone providers, and there are even free versions that stores, manages, and organizes digital versions of store membership cards, coupons, loyalty cards, virtual gift cards, or any other piece of information that you store in your traditional wallet. Windows even offers a PC software version of a virtual wallet, but it’s more focused on protecting all those passwords, account numbers, and access codes vs. making purchases and using your loyalty rewards points or gift cards.

GiftCard Partners feels the Virtual Wallet that will not only change our way of shopping, paying, and redeeming, but will also combine the best of the above types and allow us to:

At GiftCard Partners, we follow gift card technology closely and we’ve been doing some trend reporting on e-Gift cards (aka eCerts & virtual gift cards), mobile Gift cards (aka mCerts), and their place in
virtual wallets (see last week’s post:
Virtual Wallets: What are they…Really?). These technologies affect our clients (retailers) as they navigate through their adoption of technology across their retail locations, ecommerce sites, and in their B2B or bulk gift card business. It also affects our customers, as they receive their cards and deliver them to their end user differently. The end users, who receive the cards as part of workplace incentive programs or loyalty rewards, receive their cards fast and can use them with optimal convenience.  Here, let’s take notice of yet another party that benefits from this technology…Mother Earth. In E-Gift Cards Pushing Out Plastic Credit, Earth911 highlights that implementing e-Gift card technology reduces the industry’s carbon footprint and “spares natural resources by offering retail credit via online delivery”. Decomposition resistant plastic card resins, laminates, inks & dyes combined with packaging and fuel for shipping…all are eliminated by technologists and the retail industries’ movement to Go Green with gift cards. Also consider that gift cards are just a tiny slice of the overall plastic and paper pie, if you add up all the payment methods that could eventually reside in a virtual wallet. Although consumer purchased gift cards were the first to go “e”, we are also seeing a strong migration in the more complicated to fulfill and distribute, B2B market. More than ½ of our clients already offer technology based gift cards and another ¼ of them are in the process now. As more retailers adopt non-plastic gift card methods, companies like
CashStarTM,
RevTrax® and
Transaction WirelessTM lead the way to provide critical pieces to make B2B bulk corporate gift cards widely available. Until our wallets are all virtual, encourage your cards’ recipients to recycle their used gift cards here:

Visit Alison Neumer Lara's Earth911 article.

In today’s fast-paced, mobile-driven world, the convenience of mobile gift cards and the rise of QR codes have revolutionized how businesses connect with consumers. QR codes, those small squares with black and white pixels, have become ubiquitous across industries—from product packaging to restaurant menus—and are increasingly tied to marketing and consumer engagement strategies. As the gift card industry continues to evolve, QR codes offer new opportunities for companies looking to innovate in how they deliver value to customers and employees alike.