Start Your Gift Card Program Now!

U.S. shoppers bought gift cards in just about every type of retail store and shopping center this holiday season, spending a record $27.8 billion on the plastic presents, according to the National Retail Federation. By mid-January, though, their recipients had redeemed fewer than half – 37.3 percent – the trade group said Tuesday.

That is a perfect reason to put a gift card program into your retail outlet. Not only is this gift card income, money you get to use interest free, but a majority of gift card users spend more than the balance on the gift card and portions of the balance are never used at all. ProphetLine POS Software builds a gift card program into their product through their credit card processing partner, Mercury Payment Systems. If you use the credit and debit card functions of Mercury, you incur no transaction fees on the gift card usage.