What a New Benchmark of 120 Retailers Reveals About Digital Gift Cards in 2026

120 Brands, One Report Card

In July, Blackhawk Network (BHN) and NAPCO Research released their ninth annual Best Direct Digital Gift Cards Benchmark Report, grading 120 brands across the US and Canada on 147 criteria spanning 19 industry verticals, from online marketplaces and dining to home improvement and pet supplies. It is the closest thing the gift card industry has to an annual report card, and it is aimed at the big first-party programs run by national retailers, not Shopify apps. But the criteria it grades on, and where 120 well-resourced brands still fall short, is a useful mirror for any merchant selling gift cards on Shopify.

New for 2026, the benchmark added five criteria it hadn't graded before: AI search visibility, group gifting, animated card designs, delivery notifications, and what the report calls "purchase-flow integrity." Those additions are not arbitrary. They track where BHN and NAPCO see the biggest gaps between what shoppers now expect and what most gift card programs still deliver. The topline finding, in the words of BHN CEO Talbott Roche: "the strongest programs make gift cards easy to find, personalize, purchase and use across the digital channels consumers already rely on." Most programs in the study aren't there yet.

The AI Discovery Gap Is Bigger Than Anyone's Roadmap

The headline finding is about AI. Capital One Shopping research found that AI-driven traffic to retail websites grew roughly 4,700% in 2025, and Morgan Stanley projects that nearly half of online shoppers will use AI shopping agents by 2030. BHN's own consumer research backs this up specifically for gifting: 33% of shoppers now use AI to compare products and find the best price when gift shopping.

Against that backdrop, the benchmark's AI-search criteria landed like a cold shower. Only 61% of the 120 brands assessed met the report's baseline for being discoverable through AI search tools at all. Just 5% offered AI-powered gifting recommendations of any kind. These are companies with dedicated e-commerce teams and eight-figure marketing budgets, and most of them are still invisible to the exact channel where a third of gift buyers now start looking.

For a Shopify store, the practical takeaway isn't "build an AI recommendation engine." It's that basic hygiene, like clear product titles, structured gift card denominations, occasion-specific landing pages, and an FAQ page that answers the questions an AI agent would need answered, is table stakes now, not a nice-to-have. Our post on gift card personalization in the age of AI goes deeper on what that looks like in practice.

Scheduled Delivery: A "New" Feature for Retailers, a Default for Shopify Apps

The second gap is the one most directly relevant to how GoGiftCards is built. The benchmark measured how flexible brands are about digital delivery: 66% of the 120 brands offer text (SMS) delivery, but only 48% offer scheduled delivery, meaning a purchaser can pick a future send date so the card arrives on the actual occasion rather than the day it was bought.

Read that again: fewer than half of major North American retail brands, in 2026, let a customer buy a birthday gift card two weeks early and have it show up on the birthday. That is not an edge case. It is the single most obvious feature a gifting product should have, and it is missing from the majority of programs this benchmark studied.

It is also exactly what Shopify's native gift cards can't do: they generate a code instantly with no recipient field and no delivery date, full stop. Scheduled delivery for any occasion, where the customer picks the date and the platform handles sending it at the right time in the recipient's local morning, isn't a stretch feature for GoGiftCards. It is one of the eight things the app is built around. If a benchmark grading Best Buy and Amazon still finds this feature missing at more than half the brands it studies, it is a genuine differentiator for a Shopify store to have it working correctly today.

The Mobile Gap Between Leaders and Laggards Is Widening

Mobile experience showed the starkest spread in the entire report. The three highest-performing industry verticals averaged 85% across the benchmark's mobile-experience criteria. The three lowest-performing verticals averaged 41%. That is not a small gap between a good program and a great one. It is the difference between a purchase flow that works on a phone and one that doesn't.

This matters more for gift cards than for almost any other product category, because gift card purchases are disproportionately impulsive and disproportionately last-minute. A shopper remembering a birthday on their commute is transacting on a phone, in a browser, often for the first time on that particular store. If the flow from "search" to "checkout" has friction, that sale doesn't get abandoned and retried later. It gets abandoned and completed somewhere else. Our H1 2026 data report found gift card checkout still carries more friction than core cart checkout on a meaningful share of Shopify stores; this benchmark suggests that gap is industry-wide, not Shopify-specific, which makes fixing it a real competitive opening rather than table-stakes maintenance.

Year-Round Marketing Is Still the Biggest Miss

The category BHN and NAPCO graded worst overall wasn't AI or mobile. It was marketing. Across the full 120-brand set, programs averaged just 34% on the criteria measuring how well gift cards are promoted across the site, app, email, social, search, and sales promotions.

That is a strange result given the demand data sitting right next to it in the same report: Americans buy an average of nine gift cards a year for occasions that have nothing to do with the holidays, including thank-yous (83%), Valentine's Day (79%), and birthdays (77%). Nearly 40% of shoppers say a promotion or bonus card makes them more likely to buy one at all. The demand is spread across the calendar. The marketing budget, evidently, is not.

This is the same pattern our own research turned up when we looked at gift cards as a year-round revenue channel rather than a Q4-only line item: most stores treat gift cards as a holiday afterthought, then wonder why the category goes quiet the other ten months. A benchmark of 120 major retail brands scoring only 34% on the exact same behavior suggests this isn't a small-merchant blind spot. It's an industry-wide one, and one of the easier gaps on this list to close, since it's a scheduling and content problem rather than an engineering one.

What "Purchase-Flow Integrity" Is Really About

The newest and vaguest-sounding criterion in the 2026 benchmark, purchase-flow integrity, is really asking a simple question: does the money move where it's supposed to, every time, with a record of what happened? It's the kind of thing that's invisible when it works and expensive when it doesn't.

Shopify merchants run into a version of this problem constantly, even outside gift card purchases. A recent community.shopify.com thread on issuing store credit at volume put it well: merchants reach for gift cards as a workaround because "it's the only native thing that behaves like money," but the tradeoff is real: "you lose the connection to the customer's actual credit balance, no expiry control, no single place to see what's owed, and reconciling it later is painful." That's purchase-flow integrity failing quietly, one manually-issued card at a time, with no audit trail to catch it.

It's also why fraud protection and full visibility aren't separate features from delivery and personalization, they're the same category of problem. A gift card program with no risk scoring, no approval queue, and no real-time record of what was issued, sent, and redeemed is failing purchase-flow integrity even if the checkout button works perfectly.

Why This Matters Even If the Benchmark Wasn't Built for Shopify

It's worth being direct about scope: this benchmark studies first-party gift card programs at large multi-channel retailers, and Shopify's gift card app category looks different. Store Leads data puts roughly 318 active apps in Shopify's gift cards category alone, a fragmented field where most merchants never fully evaluate what they've installed. But the underlying consumer expectations the benchmark is measuring don't change by platform. A shopper who expects AI-discoverable products, scheduled delivery, a smooth mobile checkout, and year-round promotion doesn't lower that bar because the store happens to run on Shopify instead of a retailer's own stack.

What the benchmark makes clear is that even brands with dedicated product and marketing teams are still getting the basics wrong: fewer than half offer scheduled delivery, a third score poorly on mobile, and the industry as a whole is nearly invisible to AI shopping tools. Meeting that bar isn't about outspending Best Buy's e-commerce team. On Shopify, it's mostly about which app you installed and whether you configured it to use what it already does.

Want a gift card program that already checks the boxes this benchmark is measuring: scheduled sends for any occasion, branded and personalized gift pages, automatic fraud and risk scoring, and real-time visibility into every card issued? Install GoGiftCards from the Shopify App Store. Plans start at $4.99/mo with a free 7-day trial, no credit card required.