Gift Cards

Updated Jun 3, 2026 Promotions & Growth

Gift cards let your customers buy store credit for someone else. The buyer picks an amount on your storefront, the recipient is emailed a unique code, and that code is redeemed at checkout to pay for an order — in full or in part. Everything is managed from one screen, Growth → Gift Cards, and it’s built into TitanCart with nothing extra to install.

Note: A gift card has two halves. Selling one happens on your storefront: the buyer adds it to the cart like any product, and once their payment is confirmed the recipient receives a branded email with a code. Spending one happens at checkout: the recipient enters that code and it draws down the order total. Both halves are covered below.

1. Where gift cards live

Open Growth → Gift Cards. The list shows every card with its code, original amount, remaining balance, recipient, and status. Across the top, summary tiles show how many cards exist, how many are active, the total value issued, the outstanding balance still on active cards, and the total redeemed so far.

From here you can create a card with + New Gift Card, click any row to edit it, disable a card, resend its email, or delete it. You can search by code, recipient or sender, and filter by status.

Tip: Gift Cards is a built-in feature, switched on by default. If the Gift Cards menu item or the checkout redemption field is missing, check that the Gift Cards extension is enabled under Extensions.

2. How customers buy a gift card

Customers purchase gift cards from a storefront page you create with the [titancart_gift_cards] shortcode. (Add it to a page called, say, “Gift Cards” and link to it from your menu.) On that page the buyer:

Picks a preset amount — $25, $50, $75, $100, $150 or $200 — or types a custom amount. By default the custom amount runs from $5 to $1,000; you can set your own minimum and maximum under Settings → Gift Cards.
Enters the recipient’s name and email, their own name as the sender, and an optional personal message.
Adds it to the cart and checks out like any other purchase.

The gift card rides through the cart and checkout as a normal line item. The real card — with its unique code — is created and emailed to the recipient once the order’s payment is confirmed, not the moment the order is placed. If a buyer orders a quantity of two, two separate cards are generated.

Note: Because cards are generated at payment confirmation, an abandoned or declined order never produces a live card or sends an email. The recipient only ever receives a code that’s backed by a real, paid balance.

3. Issuing a card yourself

You don’t need a sale to hand out a gift card. Click + New Gift Card and fill in:

Amount — the value the card starts with. Its balance starts equal to the amount.
Recipient name and email, and your sender name and an optional message.
Status — leave it Active so it can be used right away.
Expiry date (optional) — leave blank for a card that never expires.

When you save an active card with a recipient email, TitanCart emails them the code automatically. This is the way to send a manual gift, a goodwill credit, or a prize. The card you create is a real, spendable card identical to a purchased one.

4. How a customer redeems a card

Redemption happens at checkout. Under the order summary there’s a Gift Card block with a “Have a gift card?” field. The customer enters the code and clicks Apply. TitanCart checks the card is valid and applies it, showing a Gift Card line in the order summary with the amount taken off. Remove clears it again.

A gift card pays down whatever is left of the order total:

If the card’s balance is more than the order total, the whole order is covered — the total can drop to $0.00 — and the leftover balance stays on the card for next time.
If the card’s balance is less than the total, it pays what it can and the customer pays the rest with their normal payment method.

Note: The balance is only drawn down when the order’s payment is confirmed. The amount is held against the order while the customer pays; if the payment never completes, the card keeps its full balance. The card is also re-checked at the moment of payment, so a card that runs out or is disabled between “Apply” and paying simply spends whatever is genuinely left.

5. How gift cards combine with other discounts

A single order can carry a coupon, reward points and a gift card. They’re applied in a deliberate order: a coupon discount first, then reward points, and finally the gift card, which pays down whatever remains. That’s the natural mental model — the gift card settles the bill after every other saving has been applied. The gift card draw never pushes a total below zero.

6. Managing a card after it’s issued

Open any card to manage it. You can:

Adjust the amount — raising or lowering it shifts the remaining balance by the same difference, and the change is recorded in the card’s history.
Update the recipient, sender, message or expiry date.
Disable a card so it can no longer be redeemed (useful if a code is lost or issued in error). A disabled card can be re-enabled by setting its status back to Active.
Resend the email if the recipient never received it.
Delete a card entirely.

Each card keeps an activity history — when it was created, any admin adjustment, and every redemption against an order — so you can always see where its balance went. A card automatically flips to Used when its balance reaches zero.

Tip: A few options live under Settings → Gift Cards: the minimum and maximum custom amount a customer can buy (defaults $5 and $1,000), the code prefix for generated codes (GC by default, for example GC-X7K9…, applied to codes created from then on), and how many cards show per page in the admin list.

What gift cards do — and don’t

Note: A gift card is store credit, not a discount. It pays toward the order total — including shipping and tax — rather than reducing a product’s price. Codes are stored in upper case and matched without regard to case, so gc-x7k9 and GC-X7K9 are the same code. Cards don’t expire unless you set an expiry date, and a card with a leftover balance stays usable until it’s spent. Gift cards are TitanCart’s own feature — they don’t use WordPress coupons or any third-party plugin.

Troubleshooting

The code is rejected at checkout. TitanCart will say why: the code wasn’t found (check for typos), the card isn’t active (it may be disabled or fully used), it has expired, or it has no balance left. Capitalisation is never the cause — codes are case-insensitive.
The total didn’t drop by the full balance. A gift card only ever covers the order total. If the balance is larger than the order, the order goes to $0.00 and the rest stays on the card; it doesn’t pay out cash.
There’s no “Have a gift card?” field at checkout. The redemption field only appears when the Gift Cards extension is enabled. Check Extensions and make sure it’s switched on.
The recipient didn’t get the email. Confirm the card is Active and has a valid recipient email, then use Resend from the card. As with all store email, delivery depends on your site’s mail setup — check spam, and consider an SMTP service if store emails generally aren’t arriving.
A purchased card hasn’t appeared yet. Cards are generated when the order’s payment is confirmed. If an order is still awaiting payment (or the payment was declined), no card is created — by design.