# Shopify Gift Cards: Setup, Expiry Rules, and Balance Checks

Source: https://storefrontanswers.com/2026-10-31-shopify-gift-cards-setup-expiry-balances/

Gift cards on Shopify look like a five minute feature and behave like stored value with rules. How denominations, expiry law, balance checks, and fraud holds actually work.

## What Shopify actually gives you

A Shopify gift card is a stored value code, sold as a product, delivered by email, and redeemed at checkout like a payment method for whatever balance remains. You set denominations, the buyer picks one, and the recipient spends it down across as many orders as the balance covers. Cards can also be issued free from the admin, which is how stores use them for goodwill, contest prizes, and make goods. That dual life, sold product and service recovery tool, is why gift cards deserve a setup pass instead of a toggle and forget.

Physical cards are the part new stores miss. Selling a card that arrives in a box requires a fulfillment choice: print your own with the code, use a card printing service, or accept that the emailed code is the product. Decide before you list them, because a customer who buys a gift for a birthday and receives only an email they must forward has a complaint your support team will hear about in December, at volume.

## Denominations and the December math

Four or five denominations spanning your average order value sell better than a wall of options. Anchor one below your typical order, one near it, and one or two above for the generous buyer. The below AOV card is not a mistake. It pulls a new customer into a first order where they spend past the card, which is the entire economics of the channel. Custom amount cards sound flexible and mostly create odd balances and support questions, so most stores do better with fixed steps.

Gift cards also warp your December and January numbers in opposite directions. December books the sale. January books the redemption orders at a discount to cash, plus a share of balances that never get spent, which accountants call breakage and which you cannot recognize as revenue just because you feel like it. If you judge holiday performance on December alone, gift cards will flatter you and January will confuse you. Brief whoever reads the reports before the season, not after.

## Expiry is law, not a setting

In the United States, federal law sets a floor: gift cards generally cannot expire in under five years, and dormancy fees are restricted. Several states go further and ban expiry outright or treat long abandoned balances as unclaimed property. Shopify lets you set an expiry date, and the existence of the setting tempts stores to use a one year expiry that may be illegal where the buyer lives. The safe default for most stores is no expiry at all. The marketing gain from urgency is small, the legal exposure and the customer anger are not.

Issued free cards and promotional cards play by different rules in some jurisdictions, which is exactly why this needs a deliberate decision rather than a copied setting from another store. Write your policy on the gift card page itself: whether cards expire, whether they can be replaced if the email is lost, and how a recipient checks a balance. Most gift card support tickets are these three questions wearing seasonal costumes.

## Balance checks, fraud, and the unglamorous edge cases

Recipients check balances through the link in their original email, which they deleted. Plan for it: a balance check path on your site or a support macro that verifies identity and resends the card details will absorb most of it. What you must not do is let staff look up full card codes from partial information for anyone who asks nicely, because gift card codes are cash, and draining stolen balances is an old, organized fraud pattern, not a hypothetical.

Watch the sold card fraud pattern too: cards bought with stolen payment methods, resold, then charged back after the balance is spent. New stores with suddenly popular high denomination cards are the target profile. Review velocity on card sales the way you review any high risk product, hold fulfillment on suspicious orders, and remember that disabling a card in the admin is a real tool, but only before the balance walks away.

## Related reading

If this topic is useful, these earlier guides go deeper on connected questions: [Shopify POS: When a Store Actually Needs It, and When It Is a Distraction](https://storefrontanswers.com/2026-10-30-shopify-pos-when-retail-store-needs-it/), [Shopify Flow: What It Actually Automates, and Where It Stops](https://storefrontanswers.com/2026-10-30-shopify-flow-what-it-automates/), and [Shopify Draft Orders: When to Use Them and When Not To](https://storefrontanswers.com/2026-10-29-shopify-draft-orders-when-to-use/).

## Frequently asked questions

### Do Shopify gift cards expire?

Only if you set an expiry, and the law limits what you can set. Federal rules generally require at least five years, and some states ban expiry entirely. Most stores are safest issuing cards with no expiry and saying so on the product page.

### How does a customer check their gift card balance?

Through the link in the original gift card email, which shows the remaining balance. Since recipients lose that email, have a support process to verify the buyer and resend the card details, and never reveal full codes from partial information.

### Can gift cards be used across multiple orders?

Yes. The balance stays on the code and can be spent down over several orders, combined with another payment method when the balance runs short. That is standard Shopify behavior and worth stating on the gift card page.

### When should free gift cards be used instead of refunds or discounts?

For service recovery, prizes, and goodwill, where a stored value credit brings the customer back without training them to expect discount codes. Issue them from the admin with a note on why, so the next person reading the account sees the history.