The world has forever changed and, as a result, brands have had to pivot their businesses online. An unexpected silver lining of this digital revolution is that consumers young and old learned how to shop online – and they are doing so in record numbers.
At ICEE Social, we too hunkered down during this revolution to try and support brands and migrate as many merchants as we could onto Shopify.
As we were migrating stores fully online, we began to see a pattern. Almost all of the established brands that we were bringing to Shopify & Shopify POS had one thing in common: a ton of Gift Cards that they needed to migrate as well.
People's search queries for Gift Cards during the holidays 7/9/19 - 7/9/21 via Google Trends
The majority of these retailers had a legacy POS system and a Shopify Online store, or a legacy POS system connected to an outdated CMS via a broken middleware system. In almost every case, there was a huge disconnect between merchant’s brick and mortar business and their online stores.
In hindsight, this should have been obvious. Any savvy retailer that wanted to compete with enterprise businesses would need to have a proper sales and marketing strategy that included Gift Cards.
As we continued to migrate these merchants onto an omnichannel solution via Shopify POS and Shopify Online, we kept needing solutions to migrate these merchants' Gift Cards.
Looking back in the past few years we have built a ton of private Gift Card migration tools. Our goal for 2021 was to build a tool that merchants and entrepreneurs could use on their own to migrate their Gift Cards from their legacy POS system or legacy CMS. The culmination of this effort resulted in us building a brand new Shopify App called Selling Point. We set out to lower the barrier to entry for merchants to be able to migrate all of their Gift Cards to Shopify with ease, in addition to other elements of their migration such as products, customers & photos.
We are really excited to arm all of you merchants with the tools you need to migrate to a true Retail Operating System like Shopify.
Now that we’ve got you thinking about Gift Cards, you may recall that during the pandemic businesses that never had an online store had their most loyal customers buy IOU gift cards that could be redeemed in store once everything opened back up. Gift cards remain a great way to promote in-store and local sales.
Here are some winning strategies to grow your Gift Card offering:
If you’d like more winning strategies, support with our new app or for us to assist with your migration, please contact us below.
