Businesses: Want to Offer Gift Cards? Just Think Yiftee

September 9, 2015         By: Steven Anderson

The idea of offering a gift card for use at a business is likely one that’s crossed at least a few minds a time or two. Taking advantage of the increasing propensity to use gift cards as a Christmas present or other similar gift likely hasn’t been lost on merchants of all sizes.

It can be hard to institute such programs, and the combined force of Yiftee and Global Payments Inc. looks to make it just a bit easier to offer this increasingly-prevalent holiday staple.

Basically, the partnership allows Global Payments merchants to add a gift card link to a current website, and then, with a quick sign-up page on hand, merchants can get in on gift cards. Better yet, this is available to any merchant that’s already set up to accept MasterCard, and is actually pretty simple.

After the sign-up is done, customers can purchase a virtual gift card, and then send it to whatever recipient they so choose. The lucky recipient, meanwhile, gets a virtual gift voucher and a personalized message by email, text, or even by tweet, and Yiftee does all the heavy lifting of tracking and handling the vouchers.

Granted, it’s hardly the same thing as offering gift cards—there are no little slips of plastic to handily slip into small, gift-wrapped packages—but for those who are far off, this could be one of the easiest ways to send a gift yet. Firing off a mobile gift card to a student in college on his or her birthday, for example, would likely mean brisk business for the companies involved and also a handy way for well-meaning parents and loved ones to celebrate a special event by remote.

It may not be such a great help at Christmas time, but then again, it might be for those out of town who can’t make a family event. Consider those with two families to celebrate with; there’s often some friction as to who gets “skipped” that year.

With Yiftee involved, it becomes a lot easier to remember the “skipped” family, and help keep relations smooth. No one wants Christmas to be a source of friction, and this may be just the tool to help some families better keep that connection alive.

There’s plenty of possibility afoot with the combination of Yiftee and Global Payments, and we’ll likely see a good slug of online gift cards get sold as a result. That’s welcome news for a lot of businesses out there, who may have wanted to get in on gift cards, but just found the process too cumbersome.

Now, it’s a whole lot easier to offer those valuable little tokens, and something easier to offer is generally more often used.