WooCommerce Gift Card Plugins Compared for US Stores

WooCommerce gift card plugins all sell the same headline feature — a card with a code on it — and then differ enormously in the three places that actually cost you money: whether the code arrives in the recipient’s inbox, whether you can get your outstanding balances back out again, and whether the expiry setting the plugin offers is legal to use on a US customer. Two of those are never mentioned on a pricing page.

Below: what WooCommerce gives you free before you buy anything, the seven criteria I judged each option against, a table of versions, install counts and prices checked on 1 October 2026 against WooCommerce 11.1.2 on WordPress 7.1.2, the federal rule that makes most expiry settings unusable, and the tax and accounting side that store owners discover in January.

A gift card is a liability, not a sale

Start here, because it changes which features matter. When someone pays you $100 for a gift card, you have taken $100 of cash and promised $100 of goods. The revenue happens later, when the card is redeemed. Until then the balance sits on your books as deferred revenue — money you are holding on someone else’s behalf.

That has three practical consequences for which plugin you pick. You need a running total of outstanding balances, not just a list of codes. You need to be able to export that total and the individual cards behind it, because a plugin you cannot export from is a plugin you can never leave. And you need to think about what happens to cards nobody ever redeems, which is a question with a different answer in every state.

What WooCommerce does for free

There is no gift card feature in WooCommerce core. There is, however, a coupon system, and for a store selling a handful of cards a year that is genuinely enough.

Create a product called Gift Card, set it to a fixed price, and when somebody buys one you manually create a coupon under Marketing > Coupons with a Fixed cart discount of that amount, a usage limit of one, and a random code. Email it to the recipient. That is a gift card. It took you four minutes.

Where it falls apart is at volume and at partial redemption. A fixed cart discount coupon is spent the moment it is used, even on a $12 order against a $100 card — core has no concept of a remaining balance, so your customer loses $88 and you get an email about it. There is also no automation: every card is a manual coupon, and on 20 December you will be making forty of them by hand.

So the free baseline is real but narrow. Under roughly one card a week, and if partial redemption never comes up, use coupons and spend nothing. Above that, the balance-tracking is the thing you are buying.

The seven criteria I judged each WooCommerce gift card plugin on

Stated up front so you can reweight them if your store looks nothing like the one I assumed: a US business, digital cards only, selling somewhere between 10 and 500 a year with a heavy November and December, and one person who configures plugins between other jobs.

1. Does the free tier sell and redeem a card end to end? Not “has a free version” — can a customer buy a card, can the recipient receive a code, and can that code be spent at checkout with a balance left over. Several free tiers stop one step short of that and the step they stop at is redemption.
2. Block checkout and HPOS, stated explicitly. Gift card redemption needs a field on the checkout, and the Cart and Checkout blocks need that field integrated through the Store API. A plugin written only for the classic shortcode checkout shows nothing on a block checkout and warns you about nothing.
3. Partial redemption and remaining balance. The one thing coupons cannot do, and therefore the main reason to be here at all.
4. Expiry that can be switched off. See the next section. For US sales an expiry date is a compliance question, not a convenience, and a plugin that forces one on you is a problem.
5. Liability reporting. One screen showing total outstanding balance. Your accountant will ask for this number and you do not want to be adding up a CSV by hand in April.
6. Export of outstanding codes. The exit route. Cards live in plugin-owned database tables, and a plugin without CSV export locks every unredeemed dollar inside itself.
7. Renewal price, not first-year price. Promotional first years are standard in this category. Budget what it costs in year two.

The expiry trap: five years, federally

Nearly every plugin in this category advertises configurable expiration dates, usually with a default of six or twelve months, and for a US store that default is the single most dangerous setting on the screen.

Under the federal rules the FTC describes for gift cards and gift certificates, money on a gift card cannot expire for at least five years from the date it was purchased, or from the last date money was added to it. Inactivity or dormancy fees are restricted too: no more than one per month, and only after twelve consecutive months of non-use. Any expiry date and any fee has to be disclosed clearly on the card or its packaging — which, for a digital card, means on the card email and the product page.

Several states go further than the federal floor, and a few effectively prohibit expiry on retail gift certificates altogether. The federal rule is a minimum, not a safe harbour.

Practically, this makes criterion four simple. A plugin where expiry is optional and can be set to never is fine. A plugin where expiry is mandatory with a maximum of 24 months is not usable for US sales, whatever else it does well.

WooCommerce gift card plugins compared

Versions, install counts and ratings come from WordPress.org and the vendors’ own listings; prices come from each vendor’s pricing page. All checked on 1 October 2026, against WooCommerce 11.1.2 and WordPress 7.1.2. On a narrow screen this table stacks into one card per option rather than scrolling sideways.

The honest summary of that table: install the free PW plugin first. It is the only free tier that does the whole job — sell, deliver, redeem partially, report liability — and at 20,000 installs and 4.7/5 it has the strongest evidence base in the category. Run it for a quarter. If the only thing you end up wanting is a card that looks like a gift rather than a receipt, you then know exactly what you are buying and from whom.

Sales tax on the card, or on what it buys?

The general principle across US states is that selling a gift card is not a taxable retail sale, because no goods have changed hands yet. Tax applies when the card is redeemed, on whatever the customer actually buys. Tax the card at purchase and you have collected tax twice on the same hundred dollars.

In WooCommerce that is one field. Edit the gift card product, open the General tab under Product data, and set Tax status to None. Do it for every gift card product and every variation, because tax status is per-product and a variable card with five amounts is five chances to miss one.

Then check the other half: when the card is redeemed, is the balance applied before or after tax? PW applies it after tax, which keeps your tax line correct — the customer still owes tax on the goods, and the card pays part of the total including that tax. A plugin that deducts the balance from the subtotal before tax is calculated will under-collect, and you will not notice until a return is filed. Buy a $25 test card, spend it on a $40 taxable product, and read the order totals line by line. WooCommerce sales tax plugins compared for US stores covers the automation layer once you know what your numbers should look like.

The email is the product

This is the failure that generates phone calls. With a physical product, a missing delivery confirmation is annoying. With a gift card, the email is the thing the customer paid for. If it lands in spam on 23 December, you have not had a deliverability problem, you have had a refund.

WordPress sends mail through PHP’s mail() by default, straight from your web server, with no authentication — the exact pattern mailbox providers treat as suspicious. Gift card emails make it worse on two counts: they go to a recipient who has never heard of your store and has no prior relationship with your sending domain, and they contain a code and a link, which is what a phishing message looks like. Route them through authenticated SMTP with SPF, DKIM and DMARC in place before your first December.

Whichever you use, test with a real inbox at a real provider — Gmail and Outlook.com both, from a clean address that has never emailed you — and check the spam folder explicitly rather than concluding it worked because something arrived. Then send one to an address at your own domain, because self-addressed mail often takes a different path and proves nothing.

Four things to test before you take real money

• A card that covers the whole order. If the balance pays 100% of the total, the order total is zero and no payment gateway is charged. Some checkout configurations handle that cleanly and some stall on a gateway that will not accept a zero-value transaction. Place that order yourself before a customer finds it.
• A card plus a coupon. Stacking is where arithmetic goes wrong. Apply a 20% coupon and a gift card to the same cart and check the order total, the tax line and the remaining balance on the card afterwards. Decide deliberately whether you want to allow it.
• Buying a gift card with a store-wide sale running. A 20%-off-everything coupon will happily take 20% off a $100 gift card, which means you sold $100 of liability for $80. Exclude gift card products from your coupons — most plugins have a setting, and the snippet below is the fallback.
• Redemption on block checkout specifically. If you migrated your checkout page to the Checkout block, confirm the gift card field renders there. A missing field produces no error at all; it is simply absent, and you will read that as “the customer must have typed the code wrong”.

<?php
// wp-content/plugins/wpfairs-store-snippets/gift-cards.php
// Stop store-wide coupons from discounting gift card products.
// Selling a $100 card for $80 creates $20 of liability you were paid nothing for.

add_filter(
	'woocommerce_coupon_is_valid_for_product',
	function ( $valid, $product, $coupon, $values ) {
		// Product IDs (and variation IDs) of your gift card products.
		$gift_card_ids = array( 1234, 1235, 1236 );

		if ( in_array( $product->get_id(), $gift_card_ids, true ) ) {
			return false;
		}

		// Variations: check the parent too.
		if ( $product->is_type( 'variation' ) && in_array( $product->get_parent_id(), $gift_card_ids, true ) ) {
			return false;
		}

		return $valid;
	},
	10,
	4
);

Put that in a small site-specific plugin rather than your theme’s functions.php, so switching themes does not quietly re-enable discounted gift cards. Swap the IDs for yours — you can read them off the URL when editing each product.

Balances, caching and the switching problem

Two operational things that bite later rather than on day one.

The first is caching. A “check your balance” page renders a number that is true for one customer at one moment, which makes it exactly the kind of page a full-page cache must never serve. Cart and checkout are already excluded by any competent caching setup, so redemption itself is usually safe; a standalone balance-check page added via shortcode or block is not, because it is a normal page as far as the cache is concerned. Exclude it by URL the day you create it. WooCommerce caching plugins: what breaks and what works covers which plugins set store exclusions for you and which need the rule written by hand.

The second is portability, and it is the one that should influence your choice. Gift card codes and balances do not live in a standard WooCommerce table. Each plugin creates its own, and nothing reads anyone else’s. If you switch plugins with $4,000 of unredeemed cards outstanding, those cards stop working and every one of them is a customer who paid you and got nothing. That is why CSV export is criterion six and not an afterthought.

# Find out which tables your gift card plugin owns.
wp db query "SHOW TABLES LIKE '%gift%';"

# Then read its columns so you know what you can export,
# substituting the table name you found above.
wp db query "DESCRIBE wp_your_gift_card_table;"

# Outstanding liability: how much of other people's money you are holding.
# Column names vary by plugin -- check DESCRIBE first.
wp db query "SELECT COUNT(*) AS open_cards, SUM(balance) AS outstanding
  FROM wp_your_gift_card_table
  WHERE balance > 0;"

Change the wp_ prefix if yours differs, and run this against a copy or a read replica if you can. Do it once a quarter and keep the number — it is the figure your accountant wants, and it is also the figure that tells you how expensive switching plugins would be. WooCommerce backup plugins compared for store owners covers getting the database half of that backed up properly, which matters more here than for most store data: a restore that rolls back three days of redemptions hands three days of spent cards back to customers who already used them.

What to pick for your situation

• A handful of cards a year, partial redemption never comes up. Core coupons. Free, no plugin, four minutes per card. Revisit when you are making more than one a week by hand.
• You want real gift cards and have not bought anything yet. PW WooCommerce Gift Cards, free tier. It sells, delivers, redeems partially and reports liability, with 20,000+ installs and 4.7/5 behind it. Set expiry to never, set the product’s tax status to None, and send yourself a test card.
• You want first-party support and upgrade safety above all. The official WooCommerce Gift Cards extension at $79/yr, with its 30-day refund window. You are buying the vendor relationship rather than a feature the free options lack, and that is a legitimate thing to buy.
• You have a physical counter as well as a website. Ultimate Gift Cards for WooCommerce. The in-store gifting portal is in the free tier (capped at 2 staff and 20 transactions a day) and nothing else here has an equivalent. Check its WordPress and WooCommerce compatibility against your versions first.
• You want to issue account credit rather than sell presents. Wrong category — you want store credit, which is what Smart Coupons premium does. Refunds to balance and loyalty points are a different product from a transferable code.
• Cards are a December thing for you. Install and test in October. Every point in this article — deliverability, the zero-total order, coupon stacking, the tax line — is cheap to find in a quiet week and ruinous to find on the 22nd. WooCommerce abandoned cart plugins compared is the other thing worth having working before the Q4 traffic arrives.

Frequently asked questions

The short version

Install PW WooCommerce Gift Cards’ free version and run it for a quarter before you consider paying anybody. It covers the whole loop, it has the deepest evidence base in the category, and a quarter of real use tells you more about what you need than any comparison table, this one included.

Then spend an afternoon on the four settings nobody writes about: expiry set to never, tax status set to None on every card product and variation, gift cards excluded from store-wide coupons, and authenticated SMTP with a test card delivered to a real Gmail inbox. None of those is a feature you can buy. All four are the difference between gift cards being free money in December and being a support queue in January.

And write down your outstanding balance once a quarter. It is the number your accountant will ask for, and the number that tells you what changing your mind about any of this would cost.