How to create gift cards in bulk on Shopify

Why Shopify makes this harder than it should be

Shopify’s gift card admin is built around the one-off case. A customer calls, you comp them $40, you create a card. That flow is fine.

It falls apart the moment you need volume. A holiday promo where every subscriber gets their own $25 code. A corporate client buying 500 cards at $50. A migration off Square where 1,200 existing balances have to keep working. Creating those by hand is not a bad afternoon, it is a bad week.

There is a second problem that catches people out later. Once a gift card is created, Shopify only ever shows you the last four characters of the code. If nothing captured the full code at the moment of creation, that code is gone. You will find this out roughly three weeks in, when a customer emails saying they lost their card and you discover you cannot resend it.

The CSV columns that matter

Column	Required	Notes
amount	Yes	The initial balance. Mix amounts freely across rows.
currency	No	Defaults to your store currency. Set it per row to issue in the currency the customer actually shops in.
code	No	Leave blank for a generated code. Fill it in to import an existing card from another platform.
customer_email	No	Attaches the card to a customer record.
notify	No	Whether Shopify emails that customer. Only meaningful with an email.
expires_on	No	Check your local law first, gift card expiry is regulated in many places.
note	No	Internal only. Use it, future you will want to know which batch a card came from.

The mistakes worth avoiding

Creating the batch before reading the preview. Gift cards cannot be un-created, only disabled. A preview pass costs thirty seconds.

Setting an expiry because the field exists. Gift card expiry is restricted or banned outright in a lot of jurisdictions, including most of the US and the EU. Store credit is where expiry usually belongs, not gift cards.

Emailing 500 people at 2am. Notification emails fire when the card is created. If timing matters, create the cards with notify off and send through your ESP when you are ready.

Not exporting the codes. Export first, celebrate second.

Where store credit fits instead

If what you actually want is to put a balance on a customer’s account that applies automatically at their next checkout, you want store credit, not gift cards. No code, nothing to lose, nothing to forward to a friend. See bulk issue store credit by CSV and the full store credit guide for the difference.

Gift cards are the right tool when the value has to be transferable, when someone is buying it as a gift, or when a corporate client needs codes they can hand out.