How do I sell digital gift cards at my coffee shop?

Ask this question and most of what you will find is written for American retailers, priced in dollars, and assumes a POS system you do not run. Meanwhile the demand is real and very British: every December, people who love your shop want to give it to someone, and in most independent cafés the answer at the till is still an apologetic "we don't really do gift cards".

That is money you are turning away twice. Once at the counter in December, and again in January, when the recipient would have walked through your door with a reason to be there in your quietest month.

The good news is that selling digital gift cards in the UK in 2026 is genuinely easy, often free to set up, and mostly a question of picking the option that fits how you already take payments. Here are the five realistic choices, with their real prices checked against their own sites, and an honest view of who each one is for. At the end there is a second question worth asking: whether what you sell should be stored money at all, or the coffee itself.

The five realistic options for a UK coffee shop

Square Gift Cards: the default if you already run Square

If your till is Square, this is almost certainly your answer, and you can have it live this afternoon. Square's UK gift cards cost nothing to set up for digital (eGift) cards, with no monthly fee. You pay Square's standard processing when a card is bought: 1.4% + 25p for UK cards purchased online through your Square eGift ordering page, or 1.75% in person. There is no extra fee when a card is redeemed. If you want plastic cards on the counter too, they start from £0.52 per card.

Redemption is the part that matters day to day, and here Square is hard to beat for its own users: the card is just another tender on the till your baristas already use. No new hardware, no training, no reconciliation headache. The honest caveat is the flip side of the same coin: if you are not on Square, this option is not for you, and it is not worth switching POS just for gift cards.

SumUp Gift Cards: the same logic for SumUp shops

The same reasoning applies if you take payments on a SumUp reader. SumUp's gift cards have no monthly cost and charge 2.5% of the gift card value, with standard transaction fees applying when cards are bought. You get a hosted page where customers buy cards, and the whole thing is designed for exactly the kind of small independent SumUp already serves.

The limitation to know about: the recipient gets their card as a digital link, and SumUp is the one option in this list with no wallet pass of any kind. For a shop whose gifting trade is a handful of cards a month, that will not matter. If you want the gift to live on the recipient's phone alongside their boarding passes, look further down the list.

Gift Up!: the standalone specialist

Gift Up! is the option when you want proper digital gift cards but your till is neither Square nor SumUp, or you simply want gifting to live apart from your POS. There is no monthly fee and no setup cost; you pay 3.49% per gift card sold (with a small minimum per card), and you connect your own payment processor, so processing fees sit on top. Prepaid bundles bring the rate down if you sell serious volume.

It is a genuinely polished product. Cards are branded to your shop, delivery can be scheduled for Christmas morning, and recipients can save their card to their phone's built-in wallet, a real wallet pass, not a PDF. Redemption is the trade-off: because Gift Up! is not your till, your team marks off redemptions in the Gift Up! app or dashboard rather than the card being just another tender. For a coffee shop doing a steady trickle of gifts, that is a minor chore. It is the best pure gift card product on this list for a shop without a Square or SumUp tie.

Toggle: brilliant for groups, heavy for one site

Toggle, from the team behind hospitality software group Access, is what the serious end of UK hospitality uses: multi-site groups, restaurant brands, shops selling experiences and merchandise alongside stored value. It is excellent at all of that, with proper e-commerce, physical card fulfilment, and integrations into hospitality POS systems.

The pricing tells you who it is for. Toggle's fixed monthly plans are quoted on application (the public page shows plans by region once you enquire), or there is a commission model at 6.5% of sales with a minimum charge, and a one-off onboarding fee applies to all plans. For a group doing tens of thousands of pounds in gifting a year, that is money well spent. For a single-site independent selling a few hundred pounds of gift cards a month, it is a lot of platform. If you run three or more sites and gifting is a real revenue line for you, book their demo. If you run one café, one of the options above will serve you better for a fraction of the cost.

PerkClub gift memberships: sell the coffee, not the balance

Everything above sells stored money. The fifth option changes what the gift actually is. Gift memberships on PerkClub let a customer buy the thing itself for someone else: ten coffees over three months, a month of daily flat whites, six pastries. The recipient gets their own pass by email, with a QR code, and gets to add it to their Apple or Google Wallet with no app to download. They redeem at your kiosk exactly like any other member, they can see what is left on their pass after every visit, and you are paid in full the moment the gift is bought.

The difference is behavioural, not technical. A £30 gift card might be spent in two visits, or dribble away, or sit forgotten. A gift of ten coffees over three months is ten separate visits, each one a chance for the habit to form, and by the end the recipient has experienced your shop as a member rather than as someone spending down a balance. Membership is open to anyone from their first visit, and if they want to carry on when the gift ends, joining takes moments. We have written up the full comparison in gift cards vs gift memberships.

Honesty about the cost structure: Gifts is a £19 per month per site add-on to a PerkClub plan, and plans start at £59 per month. If gift cards are the only thing you want, one of the free-to-start options above is the cheaper way to get them. Gift memberships make sense as part of the wider membership machine: recurring revenue from members, plus gifting that feeds new people into it. That machine is what PerkClub for coffee shops is.

What to sell and how to price it

Whichever platform you pick, the design of the gift matters more than the platform does.

For cash-value cards, keep it simple: three or four preset amounts (£10, £25, £50 covers most gifting occasions) plus a custom field. Presets convert better than an empty box because they answer the buyer's real question, which is "what is a normal amount to give?". One VAT note worth a sentence: cash-value cards that can buy anything in the shop are usually treated as multi-purpose vouchers, with VAT due when the card is redeemed rather than when it is sold. Confirm the treatment with your accountant when you set up.

For item-based gifts, design around the habit you want to create, not the amount you want to receive. Ten coffees over three months is a better gift than thirty coffees over one month, because roughly one visit a week is a rhythm a new person can actually keep, and each visit is another chance to sell a pastry alongside. Price the gift at or slightly below the counter price of its contents: the buyer is doing you the favour of bringing you a new customer and paying you months in advance, so the gift should feel generous rather than clever. Your margin comes from the upfront cash, the extra items bought per visit, and the recipients who stay on as members.

Practical setup: where the buy link goes

Every option in this guide gives you a hosted buying page with its own link. The work is putting that link where gift-buyers actually are:

• Your website, if you have one: a "Gift cards" item in the main navigation, not buried in a footer. Gifting traffic is seasonal and impatient.
• Your Instagram bio: for many independents this is the shopfront that matters. Change the bio line to say gifts are available from November.
• A QR code at the counter: a small stand by the till that says "buy a gift in 60 seconds". The people most likely to buy a gift from you are the people already standing in your shop, and December queues are full of them.
• Your Google Business Profile: add the buying link as a post and to your profile links. People searching "[your shop name] gift card" should land on the buying page in one tap.

Then let the calendar do the selling. December is where digital quietly beats physical: Royal Mail's last posting dates land in the third week of the month, and every year millions of presents are bought after them. A digital gift card or gift membership can be bought on Christmas morning in pyjamas and arrive by email a minute later, scheduled delivery included. Say exactly that in your December captions.

January is the payoff. Every gift sold in December is a person with a pre-paid reason to visit you in the exact month the high street empties. A gift of ten coffees turns one December transaction into ten January-to-March visits. If quiet months are the thing you are trying to fix, this pairs directly with the levers in surviving quiet days and slow seasons: gifting is one of the few tools that moves December's demand into February.

Which should you pick

An honest decision list, by situation:

• You take payments with Square. Use Square Gift Cards. Free to set up, redemption on the till you already run, live today. Do not overthink it.
• You take payments with SumUp. Use SumUp Gift Cards. 2.5% of card value and no monthly fee is a fair price for zero integration work. Accept the missing wallet pass.
• You are on neither, or you want gifting separate from your till. Use Gift Up!. Best standalone product, real wallet passes, 3.49% per card and nothing until you sell one.
• You run a group of three or more sites and gifting is a serious revenue line. Talk to Toggle. It is built for exactly that, and too much platform for one café.
• You want the gift to create a repeat visitor, not a balance, or you already run (or want) a membership. Sell gift memberships on PerkClub. Items over time, the recipient gets their own pass, and the gift doubles as a trial of membership.

The options are not mutually exclusive forever, but start with one. A single well-placed buying link that your team actually mentions will outsell three platforms nobody points at.

What to do this week

1. Today: pick your option from the list above based on how you take payments now. Every one of them can be live within a day.
2. This week: set your amounts or design your first item-based gift, and put the buying link in your Instagram bio and on your Google Business Profile.
3. This month: print one QR code stand for the counter and brief the team on the one-line pitch: "you can buy a gift for someone in about a minute".
4. Before November: decide your Christmas gift line-up and captions, so December's buyers find it ready and January's visits are already paid for.

Gift cards are one of the few pieces of shop admin that pay you in advance. Set the link up once, and every December after this one starts with money in the bank and new faces booked for January.

Common questions

How much does it cost to sell digital gift cards at a coffee shop?

Less than most owners expect. None of the realistic UK options charges a setup fee for digital cards. Square eGift Cards are free to set up and you pay standard card processing (1.4% + 25p for UK cards bought online through a Square eGift ordering page). SumUp charges 2.5% of the gift card value plus standard transaction fees. Gift Up! charges 3.49% per card sold, with payment processing on top through your own processor. Toggle prices its fixed plans on application, or takes 6.5% of sales on its commission plan. Gift memberships on PerkClub are a £19 per month per site add-on to a PerkClub plan.

Do gift cards have to have an expiry date in the UK?

No UK law sets a minimum or maximum expiry for gift cards, but your terms must be clear and fair under consumer law, and short expiries generate complaints out of all proportion to what they save you. Twelve months is a common, defensible choice. Item-based gifts are easier to reason about: a gift of ten coffees over three months states its own terms in the name.

How many gift cards actually get redeemed?

There is no official UK statistic, and you should be wary of anyone quoting one confidently. Gift Up!, one of the platforms in this guide, tells its merchants that unused balances typically run at around 10 to 15% of sold value. Treat unredeemed value as a bonus, not a plan: the business case for gift cards is upfront cash and new people through the door, not hoping recipients forget.

Can I sell gift cards without a website?

Yes. Every platform in this guide gives you a hosted buying page with its own link, so you do not need a website at all. Put the link in your Instagram bio, on a QR code at the counter, and in your Google Business Profile. A card by the till that says 'buy a gift in 60 seconds' does more work than most websites would.

What is the difference between a gift card and a gift membership?

A gift card is stored money: the recipient holds a balance and spends it down. A gift membership is the thing itself: six coffees, or a month of flat whites, delivered over time. The recipient knows exactly what they got, there is no awkward part-payment when the balance runs low, and each redemption is a separate visit to your shop rather than one transaction that drains the balance. Money-off cards suit gifting flexibility; item gifts suit building a visiting habit.