A gift card is the only thing a small business sells that is paid for before it is delivered, sometimes long before, and occasionally never. That is the whole economic argument for it, and it is stronger than the argument most people make, which is that gift cards bring in new customers. They do that too, unreliably. What they reliably do is move money forward.
This page is about when to use one and what it costs you to run. What the mechanism does at the counter is on the gift cards page, and this one does not repeat it.
When a balance beats a discount
The two look like the same tool and behave in opposite directions.
A discount is a cost you take at the moment of the sale, in exchange for a sale that might have happened anyway. It also teaches a customer that your prices move, which means the next full-price visit feels worse than it did before.
A balance is cash you take now against a visit later. It does not touch your prices, and the person redeeming it is usually not the person who paid. That second part is the underrated one: a gift card is your customer recommending you with their own money, which is a stronger endorsement than any referral bonus can buy.
The case for a discount instead is narrow and real: you need volume on a specific day, and you need it from people who already know you. That is a broadcast with an offer in it, not a gift card. Which surface fits which job is set out on twenty loyalty campaign ideas.
What each plan gives you
| Plan | Gift card templates | What that means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Free | None | Loyalty only. Gift cards are not on this plan. |
| Pro | One | One design, one currency, all year. |
| Enterprise | Three | A standard card plus seasonal ones, or a second currency. |
The number that constrains people is not the template count, it is that the currency belongs to the template. A template is denominated in euros, Moroccan dirhams, UAE dirhams or Qatari riyals, and every card issued from it carries that one. So a business selling in two currencies spends two of its templates on that before it has designed anything seasonal, which is the case where the Enterprise count stops being generous and starts being the requirement.
The refusal that makes it trustworthy
When a purchase costs more than the balance, Fideliya refuses the deduction and shows staff what is left. It does not clamp the card to zero and take what it can.
This sounds like a small implementation detail and it is the whole trust model. A card that silently empties itself is a card whose holder finds out at the till, in front of other people, that the number they were looking at was not the number. The refusal moves that discovery to a moment where staff can say "there is this much on it, how would you like to cover the rest", which is a normal transaction rather than an incident.
It is worth checking in anything you compare. Ask what happens when the purchase exceeds the balance, and if the answer is that the card goes to zero, you now know what your worst till moment will look like.
The two dates, and only one of them is a clock
The claim link in the email expires after 30 days. That is the token in the message, and it is short on purpose: a link to a bearer balance sitting in an old inbox for a year is a security problem rather than a convenience. A card that was never claimed can be issued again.
The balance itself never expires. There is no expiry field on a Fideliya gift card and nothing in the product ages a balance out. Depending on where you trade that may be a legal requirement rather than a choice, and either way it is the right default: nobody should lose money because they forgot about a card.
But it means something for your books, and this is the part gift card pages usually leave out. Every unspent balance is an open liability with no end date. It is not revenue, it is money you are holding against a service you still owe. A business that has sold gift cards for two years and never counted the outstanding balance has a number on its shelf it has never looked at.
- Count the outstanding balance monthly. Not the amount sold, the amount unspent. That is the figure you owe in goods.
- Watch the gap between issued and claimed. A card that was never added to a wallet is a link somebody lost, and it is worth a message to the buyer rather than a quiet write-off.
- Price denominations against real orders. An amount that maps to roughly one visit or one treatment gets spent. An awkward figure comes back as an awkward remainder, twice.
- Decide the policy before the first awkward case. Somebody will want to spend a balance across two visits, or to top one up, or to give it to somebody else. Know your answer before the person is standing there.
What this product does not do
Three limits, from the code rather than from the brochure.
Gift cards start at Pro. The free plan carries no templates at all, so a business testing the loyalty side cannot try gift cards without paying. Say that plainly rather than discovering it after promising somebody a Christmas card.
The card is money, not sessions. A Fideliya gift card is denominated in one of four money currencies. A studio wanting to sell an eight-class pack is asking for something that is not generally available, and this page is not going to imply otherwise.
Nothing chases an unspent balance. There is no automatic reminder to a recipient sitting on a card they have not used, in the same way there is no automatic message to a customer who has gone quiet. If you want an unspent balance to come back through the door, that is a message somebody writes. What that channel can and cannot promise is on push notifications from a loyalty card.
What to measure
We publish no figures of our own here. Gift card counts by status are on the explicitly not-measured list in our last production snapshot, so any redemption rate on this page would be a number we invented, and the whole point of a prepaid instrument is that the numbers are yours to count rather than ours to estimate.
The three worth keeping yourself: issued against claimed, outstanding balance, and the share of gift card holders who come back a second time with their own money. That third one is the number that says whether gift cards are acquiring customers or just moving cash forward, and it is the only one that changes what you do next. The dashboard metrics that surround it are on the seven numbers a loyalty program should report.
Sources
Every product behaviour on this page was read from this repository's source on 6 September 2026 and is cited in the source note on this article to its file and to the symbol inside it: the template counts per plan and the plan gate, the four money currencies and the helper that separates them, the validator that refuses rather than clamps a deduction, the issue path and the thirty-day claim token, the nullable pass reference that lets a gift card stand alone, the table definition showing no expiry column on the balance, and the language stamped on each card. This page quotes no statistic and no figure from our own production, because gift card counts are on the not-measured list in our last snapshot.
Fideliya is wallet-native loyalty program software for small businesses. Customers add a stamp or points card to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet in one tap, with no app to download and no account to create. Fideliya runs stamps, points, gift cards and referrals on one platform in English, French, Spanish and Arabic with full right-to-left support, and the free plan issues a real wallet pass for up to 20 customers. What the gift card does at the counter is described on the gift cards page, and the plans are on the pricing page.