Introduction
Gift cards and fixed amount discounts are both excellent rewards to offer as part of your points, referral, or VIP programs, but are not interchangeable terms. This article will explain the difference between gift cards and fixed amount discounts.
Overview
Gift card rewards
✅ This feature is available on the Growth plan and up
These rewards are treated as a form of payment, just like cash or a credit card.
You cannot add conditions to how gift cards are spent. Customers cannot be required to spend over a certain amount in order to use a gift card reward.
Customers can stack gift card rewards together and use more than one in a single purchase This is helpful when you have an ongoing site-wide promotion, but also makes these rewards more susceptible to abuse.
Smile does not award points for purchases of gift cards
📝 Smile Pro Tip: You can limit the chance of abuse by requiring customers to have a minimum number of points in their account in order to redeem any gift card reward.
ℹ️ Shopify does not provide information on when gift cards are used by a customer. Therefore gift card rewards are untracked in Smile.io. This means that we're not able to mark gift card rewards as Used or show them as Available in your customers' profile.
Fixed amount discounts
Customers cannot redeem more than one fixed amount discount on a single purchase
📋 Note: this makes fixed amount discounts a fantastic program abuse prevention measure.You can add conditions to how fixed amount discounts can be spent. An example of this would be that your customers would be required to spend over a certain amount at your store in order to use their fixed amount discount code.
These rewards cannot be used in conjunction with other onsite promotions. An example of this would be if you are running a site-wide promotion of 10% off, customers will need to choose between their fixed discount award and your site-wide promo - they cannot take advantage of both on a single purchase.
What's next?
Features available for Shopify Plus
Learn more