Gift card

A gift card, also known as a gift certificate in North America, or gift voucher or gift token in the UK, is a prepaid stored-value money card, usually issued by a retailer or bank, to be used as an alternative to cash for purchases within a particular store or related businesses. Gift cards are also given out by employers or organizations as rewards or gifts. They may also be distributed by retailers and marketers as part of a promotion strategy, to entice the recipient to come in or return to the store, and at times such cards are called cash cards. Gift cards are generally redeemable only for purchases at the relevant retail premises and cannot be cashed out, and in some situations may be subject to an expiry date or fees.

American Express, MasterCard, and Visa offer generic gift cards which need not be redeemed at particular stores, and which are widely used for cash-back marketing strategies. A feature of these cards is that they are generally anonymous and are disposed of when the stored value on a card is exhausted.

From the purchaser's point of view, a gift card is a gift, given in place of an object which the recipient may not need, when the giving of cash as a present may be regarded as socially inappropriate. In the United States, gift cards are highly popular, ranking in 2006 as the second-most given gift by consumers, the most-wanted gift by women, and the third-most wanted by males. Gift cards have become increasingly popular as they relieve the donor of selecting a specific gift. In 2012, nearly 50% of all US consumers claimed to have purchased a gift card as a present during the holiday season. In Canada, $1.8 billion was spent on gift cards, and in the UK it is estimated to have reached £3 billion in 2009, whereas in the United States about US$80 billion was paid for gift cards in 2006. The recipient of a gift card can use it at their discretion within the restrictions set by the issue, for example as to validity period and businesses that accept a particular card.

Gift card sales are not limited to banks or retailers; such other companies as airlines, cruise ships, hotels, barber shops, train companies, theme parks, restaurants and other type of companies may offer gift cards as well.

In 1932 the Book Tokens scheme was established in UK by publisher Harry Raymond. The original format of the tokens was as "lick-and-stick" stamp-like vouchers, which were glued into gift cards and had to be removed by the bookseller redeeming the token. In the 1990s, this design was changed to a "currency-style" voucher, available in a number of different denominations.

In 1994 Neiman Marcus introduced the gift card system in US using a payments infrastructure in late 1994, though Blockbuster Entertainment was the first company to do so on a wide scale, test-marketing them in 1995 and launching them around the country the next year. In the beginning, the Blockbuster gift card replaced gift certificates that were being counterfeited with recently introduced color copiers and color printers. Blockbuster's first gift card transactions were processed by what was then Nabanco of Sunrise, Florida. Nabanco was the developer of the first third-party platform for the processing of gift cards using existing payment infrastructure.

Neiman Marcus and Blockbuster were later followed by the Mobil gas card, which initially offered prepaid phone value provided by MCI. Kmart was next with the introduction of the Kmart Cash Card, which in the early generations provided prepaid phone time with AT&T. Later Kmart and Mobil dropped this feature, as it was not profitable for them. The Kmart Cash Card was the first replacement for cash returns when a shopper did not have a receipt for a gift. This practice of giving a cash card in place of cash for non-receipted returns is commonplace today with most merchants. From these early introductions, other retailers began to adapt a giftcard program to replace their gift certificate programs.

A gift card may resemble a credit card or display a specific theme on a plastic card the size of a credit card. The card is identified by a specific number or code, not usually with an individual name, and thus could be used by anybody. They are backed by an on-line electronic system for authorization. Some gift cards can be reloaded by payment and can be used thus multiple times.