GiftCard Partners Blog

The popularity of the gift card is on its way up. With the development of mainstream mobile payment systems, digital or egifting has gained popularity. Egifting reached a 4 billion dollar level in 2013, that's eight times higher than in 2012. With the convenience of one online check-out to make both purchase and delivery, the convenience factor of egifting along with the overall popularity of gift cards have created the perfect gift for consumers' busy schedules. With U.S. gift card consumption reaching levels higher than the GDP of 136 countries, there is plenty of gift card spending to go around and egifting continues to gain a higher percentage of spending.
For more gift card trends and facts check out this infographic from CEB Tower Group.

A Boston area start up may have a breakthrough in the very slow adopting mobile payments market. Loop is an e-wallet that not only attaches to your phone like a case, but actually works with your retailer's existing POS system. Mobile payments were predicted to have taken off by now, and adoption is still occurring but at a much slower rate. Mobile payments that aren't compatible with existing retail POS systems are tough for retailers because a change to a national chain's POS, involves a large scale hardware upgrades which cost money and take a long time. Bringing mobile payments to retailers existing systems is taking a new approach to this mobile payments puzzle. It puts the investment on the consumer, who is choosing to use the system, rather than force retailers to provide a system that they don't have guaranteed ROI from. Since Loop is set to hit the market this winter, we will see soon if this alternate approach catches on. The adoption has been slow but the potential could be high.
For more information on mobile payments check out this article from the Boston Globe.

At GiftCard Partners, we have been working hard to help gift card brands navigate the complicated eGifting technology landscape in their journey to offer eGift Cards. We've found that even though retailers accept that they will find new incremental gift card sales with early adoption, they have not rushed to do so. Forbes.com reports 70% of the retailers, recently evaluated in a CashStar study, now offer digital or “eGift cards”. This is up from 60% in 2011 and 40% in 2010. This is good news for consumers as we rely more and more on technology to organize our lives, but for retailers looking to offer eGift cards in the B2B marketplace; technology is a bit more complicated. But let’s get back to the important questions retailers ask themselves of their gift card program when preparing to go digital…”should we offer eGift cards yet?” Or “should we be early adopters or should we wait for other retailers to figure it out”? Chain Store Age online offers us their
Top 6 Misconceptions About eGift Cards and debunks them. Click to read on, the rebuttals, it will surprise you! 1. “eGift Cards will only cannibalize our existing gift card sales” 2. “Fraud in eGift Cards is too pervasive” 3. “Our IT department can build this internally” 4. “The technology is unproven” 5. “Customer adoption isn't there yet” 6. “New hardware will be required in all stores”
If you are a retailer looking to “go digital” with your gift cards, Gift Card Partners can help with our RFP  Management service. We embrace the tricky work of renegotiating existing vendor relationships, and help retailers implementing new relationships, with: card supplies, processors, payment systems providers, and more.  >>Learn more about our Services Suite designed to improve your gift card program.

With the holiday shopping season fast approaching retailers are preparing for big revenues and high traffic in stores. Preventing gift card fraud is a great way to ensure revenue is retained and retailers don't take a hit to their Q4 numbers because of consumer fraud. According to a recent survey by NRF 78% of retailers have been victims of gift card fraud. Here are 3 ways to prevent gift card fraud this season
1. Keep an Eye on Gift-Card Racks: Keep gift cards in an area where store clerks and floor attendants can see them. Protecting gift card numbers from view and keeping racks in plain sight will help prevent consumers from stealing cards or gift card numbers.
2. Raise a Red Flag for Zero Balance Complaints: Employees can replace customer gift cards with zero balance cards behind the register. If you receive a number of zero balance complaints from a single store it may be time to closely monitor staff.
4. Compare Number of Gift Cards Activated with the Number Sold: Doing simple comparisons of number of gift cards sold with the number activated can help you stop any issues you may have during the short 25 day shopping season. Catching a fraud issue as it's happening rather than finding out about it later is always a better strategy.
For more information on preventing gift card fraud this holiday season check out this article from Entrepreneur.com.

Achieving customer loyalty is no doubt one of the biggest challenges our clients face…it’s a moving target. Not only are consumer needs evolving by the day, but retail marketing is impacted by new consumer technologies, for online and brick-and-mortar buying. We have a general picture of how technology is effecting our brand content flow, buying experience, and rewards and loyalty – we are consumers ourselves and we participate in one or all of these brand experiences every day. But how are these technologies effecting our clients? They are retailers and merchants who partner with us to promote their gift cards in programs such as customer loyalty, engagement, and rewards. They are on the front lines of technology evolution, retail marketing, and customer loyalty and engagement and their challenges are multiplied by selling in the B2B marketplace. Check out the
Ten Ways Technology Can Enable Customer Loyalty Infographic posted on the Huffington Post online. Click image to enlarge >>