GiftCard Partners Blog

Over 3,300 U.S. consumers over the age of 18 were surveyed for this year’s
Consumer Insights Study from
First Data. The Consumer Insights study provides a comprehensive gift card insights on consumer usage. This year’s study shows how vital gift card programs are to a retailer’s marketing strategy. The popularity of online shopping and usage of mobile wallets have been embraced by consumers, as the desire grows for faster and more personalized shopping experiences.

2015 was a huge year for gift cards. For the first time, gift card sales reached $130 billion, while e-gifting rose 26% and represented $7.1 billion in volume. Here are some of the other gift card trends the industry experienced in 2015.

Recently PYMNTS.com put out its 2015 U.S Consumer Payment Choice Study which takes a look at the state of mobile purchases in the U.S. What Sarah Hartman, a Senior Director of Payment Solutions at TSYS, and Karen Webster, PYMNTS.com CEO MPD, found is very important to the rewards and loyalty industry.

The Amazon Dash button was so disruptive in concept that people thought it might be an early April fools prank on launch day, March 31st. The concept seemed so futuristic that it couldn't have been real. The main reason? Americans don't buy groceries online. In a world where omni-channel shopping is everywhere, groceries still remain are one of the biggest spending categories and one of the only categories almost exclusively available in-store. Some grocery stores, like Whole Foods Market, are piloting programs to make online groceries a possibility with delivery to consumers' homes part of the package. The concept is considered disruptive to the market, however, and since the concept is so new, adoption has been slow. Here are three ways that Amazon Dash could cause the biggest grocery disruption yet.

For years, people have predicted the end of physical payment cards.

Every time a new payment technology emerges, someone declares that debit cards are on their way out. First it was online banking. Then mobile payments. Then digital wallets. More recently, fintech apps and real-time payment rails have fueled another round of predictions.

Yet debit cards haven't disappeared. They are simply becoming less visible. According to PaymentsJournal, as consumers increasingly interact through mobile wallets and embedded payment experiences, debit cards often remain part of the underlying payment infrastructure. Federal Reserve research has also found that cards continue to play a major role as funding methods for digital wallet transactions, even when the consumer experience happens through a phone rather than a physical card.