Paper vs Plastic?

Plastic Gift Cards have the advantage! 

Paper gift certificates can put you at a disadvantage, because they allow unused portions of the gift certificate value to be redeemed in cash instead of your goods and services.

With plastic, magnetic-striped gift cards, the entire gift amount must be redeemed for your merchandise or services. Unused dollars remain loaded on the card for future redemption. In fact, small, unredeemed amounts that remain on the card are known as "breakage"--and it's profit you can keep! 

Electronic Gift Cards are easy to issue, redeem, track and reconcile.  Using our on-line reporting tools you can track all the transaction detail including the breakage.

Gift cards are also "reloadable", meaning you can reuse a card that has been fully redeemed, or add more value to an activated card.

If merchandise purchased with a gift card is returned, you can credit the dollars for the returned item(s) back to the card, rather than refunding cash. That means the gift cardholder is obligated to use the refunded balance to make another purchase at your establishment.

The gift card market - US

According to U.S. research by Faulkner & Gray (see table below), the total gift card marketplace has shown exponential growth while paper continues to decline. The following graph illustrates that not only is plastic replacing paper but it has substantially grown the market too.