Gift cards look like a solved problem on Shopify. They are on every plan, there is nothing to install, and the Products → Gift cards page has a Create gift card button that works exactly the way you would expect.

Then a corporate buyer asks for 250 cards at $50 each for their holiday employee gift, a returns agent needs to issue a $2,400 credit, or you migrate from another platform holding four years of unredeemed balances. That is the point where three separate native ceilings show up at once, and none of them are documented anywhere you would look before you needed them.

This article covers what Shopify's gift card feature actually does in September 2026, the four limits that decide whether you need an app at all, and how five currently-listed Shopify App Store apps price the gap — including the one that charges you per store order rather than per gift card.

What Shopify covers without an app

More than most comparison articles admit. The Shopify Help Center states that gift cards are available on all Shopify subscription plans — there is no Plus requirement anywhere in the base feature.

Natively, and with no app installed, you can:

• Sell gift card products at preset denominations, which generate a card when the order is fulfilled.
• Create gift cards from the admin with no payment taken, for promotions, refunds, or goodwill credits.
• Set an expiration date per card, subject to your local law.
• Issue in a local currency from any currency activated in your Markets configuration, with optional cross-currency redemption.
• Sell and redeem in person through Shopify POS, interchangeably with online cards.
• Auto-issue on a trigger using Shopify Flow with an order trigger — Shopify's own documentation calls this the recommended way to run "spend $X, get a gift card" promotions.
• Track the liability through the gift cards finance reports.

If your gift card program is "sell $25/$50/$100 cards, occasionally hand out a $20 apology credit," you are done. Do not install anything.

The four limits that change the answer

1. Two different value ceilings, and the lower one is the one you will hit

Shopify publishes a table of maximum gift card values by creation method, and the two numbers are far apart:

How the card is created	Maximum value	Adjustable?
Sold as a gift card product denomination	$10,000 USD or equivalent	Fixed maximum
Created from the Shopify admin	$2,000 USD or equivalent	Can be raised or lowered by Shopify Support, subject to review

The $2,000 figure applies to exactly the cards you create by hand — refunds, B2B incentives, wholesale credits, service recovery. Shopify's own troubleshooting page walks through the scenario where a high-value order was set up as a regular product instead of a gift card product, and the fix is blocked by this cap: "For orders above this limit, contact Shopify Support to issue the gift card."

The limit is raisable, but it is a support request with a review attached, not a settings toggle. If your returns team issues four-figure credits, find that out now rather than on a Friday afternoon.

2. Cards are created one at a time

Shopify's documented creation flow is a per-card form: pick a currency, decide cross-currency redemption, enter a value, attach a customer, save, send. There is no bulk creation step and no gift card import in that flow. The Bulk Gift Cards listing states the problem plainly in its own description: "Shopify only lets you create gift cards one at a time, in one currency."

For a 250-card corporate order, that is 250 passes through a form — which is the single most common reason merchants end up in this app category.

3. Gift card payments can carry a third-party transaction fee

This is the fact most gift card roundups miss entirely. The same Help Center page states that for Shopify stores created on or after May 12, 2025, orders that include a gift card as a payment method are charged third-party transaction fees on the order amount paid for with that gift card — and that the fee is waived for stores on the Shopify Plus plan with Shopify Payments activated.

Read that carefully. It is not a fee on selling the gift card — it is a fee on the redemption, applied to the portion of the order the customer paid for with the card. Stores opened before May 12, 2025 are unaffected. Newer stores on Basic, Grow, or Advanced are, and no app changes it: the charge is applied by Shopify to the order, not by whichever app issued the card.

If gift cards are a meaningful share of your revenue and your store is newer than that date, this belongs in your margin model before app pricing does.

4. Cards are locked to the store that issued them

Shopify treats gift cards as currency, which produces three consequences worth planning around:

• You can view only the last four characters of any code in the admin. If a customer loses the email, you cannot read the code back to them.
• Shopify states that a card can be redeemed only at the store that issued it, and that there is no native way to move or transfer gift cards between stores. Multi-store operators and anyone consolidating storefronts should treat this as a migration blocker, not a detail.
• The cross-currency redemption setting is chosen at creation and cannot be changed afterward. Shopify's own documentation walks through the FX drift risk: sell a $100 CAD card, receive $73 USD, and if the rate moves you can hand back $100 USD of product.

Where apps actually change the outcome

Given the above, an app is justified when you need one of five things, and rarely otherwise:

1. Bulk creation or CSV import — corporate gifting, employee programs, promotional batches.
2. Migration of existing codes from another platform, so old balances still work.
3. Scheduled and recipient-addressed delivery — buy in November, deliver December 24.
4. Branded gift card emails and a customer-facing balance page, beyond Shopify's default notification.
5. Expiry reminders to reduce the unredeemed-balance liability sitting on your books.

Everything else — the caps, the redemption fee, the code visibility — is Shopify-side and stays the same whichever app you install.

The five apps, compared

All figures below are from each app's Shopify App Store listing, checked September 5, 2026. Ratings and review counts move; the pricing structure is the part that matters.

App	Rating (reviews)	Built for Shopify	Entry price	What you are metered on
Rise Gift Cards & Store Credit	4.7 (757)	No	$19.99/month	Total monthly store orders
Gift Card Factory	5.0 (56)	Yes	Free plan, then $19.99/month	Bulk actions, campaign credits, Flow credits, emails, refunds
Vify: Professional Gift Cards	4.8 (123)	Yes	Free plan, then $9.99/month	Your Shopify plan tier
GiftKart: Cashback Rewards	4.9 (104)	No	Free	Not metered
Bulk Gift Cards	0.0 (0)	No	Free plan, then $49/month	Gift cards per batch

Rise Gift Cards & Store Credit

Source: Shopify App Store (Rise Gift Cards & Store Credit), retrieved September 5, 2026

The highest review count among the apps compared here, from Rise.ai, listed since December 17, 2014. It is not a gift card tool so much as a store-credit wallet: gift cards, cashback, loyalty, referrals, and store-credit refunds in one balance, with integrations listed for Checkout, Customer accounts, Shopify POS, Shopify Flow, Klaviyo, Attentive, Gorgias, Loop Returns, AfterShip, and Tapcart.

Its pricing is the thing to understand before anything else. Plans are Starter at $19.99/month (100 monthly store orders included, then $0.20 per order), Small-Business at $59.99/month (400 orders, then $0.15), and Pro at $199.99/month (2,000 orders, then $0.10), each with a 7-day free trial and an annual discount.

The denominator is total store orders, not gift card orders. A store doing 1,500 orders a month of which 40 involve a gift card is billed against 1,500. And Bulk Gift Card Creation is listed as a Pro feature — the $199.99/month tier. If bulk issuance is the only reason you are shopping, that is a demanding entry point.

Recent reviews are mixed in a way worth reading directly. The listing shows 91% five-star and 3% one-star, and two of the three most recent reviews describe failures at the point that matters: one merchant of nine months reports that vouchers stopped being redeemable and stopped being delivered, and another describes being unable to see outstanding credit balances. Rise.ai's support lead replied publicly to both. Two reviews are not a pattern, but for a feature that touches money at checkout, read the recent one-star reviews yourself before committing.

Gift Card Factory

Source: Shopify App Store (Gift Card Factory), retrieved September 5, 2026

From Code57, listed since August 6, 2021, and carrying the Built for Shopify badge. This is the closest thing in the category to a direct answer to the native gaps: autogenerate or import gift cards from other systems, bulk send, update any gift card property including balance and expiry date, refund orders onto a gift card, and a Shopify Flow extension for issuing cards inside automations.

Pricing runs a free tier labelled Trial with a stated 14-day limit, then Bronze at $19.99/month, Silver at $49.99/month, and Gold at $99.99/month. Every tier is metered on five separate counters — Bulk Operation actions, Campaign credits, Flow credits, App Emails, and Refunds — and they scale independently. Bronze gives 1,000 bulk operation actions, 500 campaign credits, 500 Flow credits, 1,000 app emails, and 50 refunds; Gold gives 10,000 / 8,000 / 5,000 / 10,000 / 350.

Map your actual program to those five numbers before picking a tier. A single 250-card corporate batch plus its emails consumes two counters at once, and a returns process that refunds to gift card will exhaust the refunds counter long before the bulk counter.

Vify: Professional Gift Cards

Source: Shopify App Store (Vify: Professional Gift Cards), retrieved September 5, 2026

From Vify.ai, listed since November 17, 2022, also Built for Shopify. Feature set is focused rather than broad: customer-chosen custom gift card values, custom email templates and sender branding, balance adjustment, an expiry reminder, a customer-facing balance checking page, and bulk gift card import. The listing shows only Shopify Flow and Shopify Admin under "Works with"; no Checkout or POS extension is listed.

Its pricing structure is unusual enough to flag. The three paid plans are STARTER at $9.99/month "For Basic Shopify," PREMIUM at $16.99/month "For Shopify/Advance Shopify," and ULTIMATE at $29.99/month "For Shopify Plus," each with a 14-day free trial. As displayed on the listing, the feature lists for all three are effectively identical — custom value, custom email templates, value adjustment, email branding, expiry reminder, bulk import. You are not buying more capability at $29.99 than at $9.99; you are paying a rate set by which Shopify plan you are on.

That is fine if you are on Basic and want the cheapest branded gift card layer available. It is worth pricing against alternatives if you are on Plus.

GiftKart: Cashback Rewards

Source: Shopify App Store (GiftKart: Cashback Rewards), retrieved September 5, 2026

From Zura Technologies, listed since August 27, 2021, and free with no paid tier shown. GiftKart is a different answer to a nearby question: instead of issuing gift cards, it runs cashback programs on top of Shopify's native store credit, with fixed or percentage cashback, multiple tiers, product- and collection-specific campaigns, customer-segment targeting by tag or unique URL, and rules to exclude shipping, tax, and discounts from the cashback calculation.

Because it sits on native store credit rather than a proprietary wallet, the balance lives in Shopify's own data model. Note that store credit and gift cards are separate features with separate caps and separate behavior at checkout — if what you need is a code a customer can hand to someone else, store credit is not it.

Listed integrations are Customer accounts, Shopify Admin, Klaviyo, Omnisend, and POS. Rating is 4.9 across 104 reviews with no one- or two-star reviews shown.

Bulk Gift Cards

Source: Shopify App Store (Bulk Gift Cards), retrieved September 5, 2026

Included here because it targets the native gap most directly, and excluded from a recommendation for the same reason it is easy to find: it launched July 15, 2026 and has zero reviews. From Win-Win Apps, it does one job — CSV upload of amounts, emails, currencies, codes, and expiry dates, with a row-by-row preview before anything is issued, plus import of existing codes from another platform and CSV export of every code.

Pricing is Free for 20 gift cards per batch, Pro at $49/month (or $411/year) for unlimited batch sizes, and a third tier listed at $1,000/month. Listed integrations are Shopify Admin only.

The free tier is genuinely useful for evaluating whether CSV batching solves your problem. But its listed data access includes permission to edit gift cards and customers, which means an app with no review history is issuing real stored value against your store. Treat a first run as a test with small amounts before a live corporate batch.

How to decide

• Selling standard denominations, occasional manual credits under $2,000 → native only. No app.
• Automated issuance on an order condition → native, using Shopify Flow. Shopify recommends this path explicitly.
• Occasional corporate batches, cost-sensitive → Gift Card Factory Bronze at $19.99/month, or Bulk Gift Cards' free tier if batches stay under 20 cards.
• Migrating unredeemed codes from another platform → Gift Card Factory or Bulk Gift Cards; both list gift card import.
• Branded gift card emails and a balance page on a small store → Vify at $9.99/month on Basic.
• Gift cards as one part of a store-credit and loyalty program → Rise, if your order volume makes its per-order pricing work.
• Rewarding repeat purchase rather than issuing transferable cards → GiftKart on native store credit, at no cost.

The part no app fixes

Before you evaluate anything, confirm three Shopify-side facts against your own store:

1. Your admin-created gift card cap is $2,000 unless you have already asked Support to raise it.
2. If your store was created on or after May 12, 2025 and you are not on Plus with Shopify Payments, gift card redemptions carry a third-party transaction fee on the amount paid with the card.
3. Gift cards do not move between stores, and you can only ever see the last four characters of a code.

Every app in this category works on top of those constraints. Pick the one whose pricing denominator matches how you actually issue cards — per store order, per bulk action, per Shopify plan, or per batch — and the rest of the decision follows.

Sources

• Gift cards considerations and overview — Shopify Help Center
• Creating gift cards — Shopify Help Center
• Creating and selling gift cards — Shopify Help Center
• giftCardCreate — Shopify GraphQL Admin API
• Rise Gift Cards & Store Credit — Shopify App Store
• Gift Card Factory — Shopify App Store
• Vify: Professional Gift Cards — Shopify App Store
• GiftKart: Cashback Rewards — Shopify App Store
• Bulk Gift Cards — Shopify App Store