WooCommerce gift cards and store credit: how selling cards with an emailed code works

Gift cards do two useful jobs for a store: they bring in new customers as presents, and they let existing shoppers hold store credit to spend later. Stock WooCommerce does not sell them, so the gap shows up most during gifting seasons. This guide explains what a working gift-card flow needs, why a stored balance matters, and how the free Gift Cards plugin handles it.

What Gift Cards and Store Credit Actually Are

A gift card is store credit a buyer pays for now so someone can spend it later. For that to work in a shop, three things have to happen:

• The card has to be sellable, as a normal product the customer can add to cart and pay for.
• The recipient has to receive something redeemable, in practice a unique code delivered to them.
• The store has to track the balance, so the code is worth a known amount and can be spent down over time.

Miss any one of these and you do not have a gift card. A code with no balance is just a coupon; a balance with no delivery never reaches the recipient.

Why Default WooCommerce Falls Short

Out of the box, WooCommerce has no gift-card product type, no mechanism to email a redeemable code to a recipient, and no stored balance with partial redemption. Coupons come close but are not the same: a coupon is a fixed discount you create by hand, not a paid-for credit that a shopper buys, receives by email, and draws down purchase after purchase. Running gifting through manual coupons or vouchers does not scale and leaves no balance to carry over.

What to Look For in a Gift-Card Tool

A gift-card flow worth using should cover the full path from sale to redemption:

• A simple way to mark a card. Turning an ordinary product into a gift card should be one switch, not a separate product type to learn.
• An emailed, redeemable code. The recipient needs a unique code by email, with control over the message they receive.
• Checkout redemption. Entering the code should reduce the order total like a discount, with no manual coupon work per card.
• A real balance. Unused value should carry over, so the card behaves like store credit rather than a single-use coupon.

How Gift Cards Does It

Gift Cards for WooCommerce is a free, open-source plugin that covers that whole path:

• Gift-card product. You mark any product as a gift card with a single toggle on the product page, so there is no new product type to manage.
• Emailed code. After purchase the plugin generates a unique code and emails it to the recipient. By default it goes to the order email, with an optional per-line recipient address.
• Redeem at checkout. A card-code field at checkout applies the code’s balance to the order total like a discount.
• Balance and partial redemption. The card balance is stored, and any unused amount carries over to later purchases until it runs out.
• Email content. The subject and body of the code email are configurable, along with a card-code prefix.
• Amount from product price. The card value comes from the product price and honours quantity, so one purchased unit issues one code.

If you need a customer-chosen amount, scheduled delivery, a balance-check shortcode, admin redemption history, custom card email designs, bulk code generation, PDF cards or multi-currency, those are Gift Cards Pro features rather than the free plugin. The free edition is enough to sell cards and have them redeemed end to end.

Gift Cards Versus Default WooCommerce

Capability	Default WooCommerce	Gift Cards (free)
Sell a gift-card product	None built in	One toggle on any product
Emailed redeemable code	None	Unique code emailed to the recipient
Recipient address	n/a	Order email, optional per-line recipient
Redeem at checkout	Manual coupons only	Card-code field applies balance as a discount
Stored balance	None	Balance stored, partial redemption carries over
Amount source	n/a	Product price, honours quantity (one code per unit)
Cost	Free (no gift cards)	Free; PRO adds custom amount, scheduled delivery, designs and more

The Short Version

A real gift card is store credit: it must be sellable, deliver a redeemable code to the recipient, and keep a balance that carries over. Default WooCommerce does none of this, and manual coupons are not a substitute. The free Gift Cards plugin marks any product as a card, emails the code, redeems it at checkout like a discount, and stores the balance with partial redemption. When you need custom amounts, scheduling, designs or bulk codes, that is where Gift Cards Pro picks up.