Gift Cards in the Wallet: What Changes

By the Kemicard team·3 August 2026·4 min read

A gift card has always had a design flaw: the person who buys it is not the person who uses it, and neither of them has any way to see what is left on it. Roughly the moment a plastic card leaves the shop, both parties lose track of it. That is the problem a wallet gift card actually solves.

Where the value leaks

Unredeemed balances are often described as a benefit to the retailer. They are not — they are a customer who received a gift from your brand and got nothing from it, and in many jurisdictions the money has to be carried as a liability for years.

• Lost cards. A plastic card in a drawer is functionally destroyed value. A pass in the wallet is not lost.
• Forgotten balances. Nobody remembers whether £7.40 or £0.40 is left, so they stop trying. A balance on the front of the pass removes the question.
• Silent expiry. Where terms allow expiry, a card that expires without warning is a complaint waiting to happen. A pass can warn.

Digital versus plastic, honestly

Plastic still wins on one thing, and it is not a small thing: it is a physical object you can hand to someone or put in a card. That matters for gifting, and it is why most retailers should run both rather than replace one with the other.

• Plastic: tangible, giftable in person, works with no phone. Costs money to produce, easy to lose, balance invisible.
• Wallet: balance visible and live, cannot be mislaid, delivered instantly at any hour, updates after purchase. Less satisfying to hand over.

The instant-delivery point is worth dwelling on. A meaningful share of gift card purchases happen the day they are needed, by someone who has left it late. A digital card is the only one that arrives in time.

Making the balance real

The single most useful property of a wallet gift card is that the balance can update after redemption. That sounds obvious and is the thing plastic never managed.

It requires the balance to live in your system of record and the pass to reflect it, rather than the value being encoded on the card itself. Which is the same architectural point as every other pass: the card is a view of a record, not a container of value.

Corporate and bulk issuance

Employee recognition, customer service recovery and B2B gifting all involve issuing many cards at once to people whose addresses you may not have. Digital removes the fulfilment problem entirely — a bulk issue and a set of links, rather than a print run and a postage budget.

It also makes the reporting possible. Which cards were activated, which were used, what the average redemption was, and how much of the programme is still outstanding.

The part to get right before launching

• Expiry terms and jurisdiction. Rules on gift card expiry and fees vary considerably by country and by state, and several places prohibit expiry outright. Confirm your position with counsel before the design, not after.
• Reload or single-use. A reloadable card behaves like a store card and changes the accounting; decide early.
• What happens at partial redemption. The most common support question. The answer should be visible on the pass.
• Fraud. Validate against the record at redemption. A code that is merely read can be screenshotted and spent twice.

A note on scope: Kemicard issues and updates the pass from your Salesforce record. It is not a payment processor and does not hold funds — the balance lives in your system, and the pass shows it.

Where it fits

A gift card is a store-card style pass, the same family as loyalty and membership. If your customers are already Salesforce records, the gift card, the loyalty balance and the membership can be three passes driven by one contact — which is the difference between a customer and three rows. See coupons and vouchers and loyalty programmes.

FAQ

• Can the recipient use it without an app? Yes — it goes to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, both already installed.
• Can we still sell plastic? Yes, and most retailers should. Share the code so the till does not care which arrives.
• Does the balance update automatically? If the balance lives in your record and redemption writes back, yes.
• Can it be re-gifted? The link can be forwarded before it is added. Once added it sits in that person's wallet.