How to import existing gift cards into Shopify

The thing that goes wrong

Gift card migration failures are almost never technical. They are reconciliation failures. Someone exports face value instead of remaining balance, or exports a stale report, and the store quietly hands out several thousand dollars it had already collected against.

So the order of operations matters more than the tooling. Freeze, export, filter, reconcile, import, verify, switch.

What you need from the old platform

Field	Why
Full code	The whole point. Partial codes are useless.
Remaining balance	Not face value. This is the number that becomes the Shopify card amount.
Customer email	Optional but worth having. Attaches the card to a customer record so support can find it later.
Issue date	Not imported, but useful for your own reconciliation.
Status	So you can drop cancelled and fully redeemed cards.

Doing the import

With Bulk Gift Cards, a migration CSV looks like this:

code,amount,currency,customer_email,notify,note
GC-4482-9917,45.00,USD,dana@example.com,,Square migration 2026-08
GC-4482-9918,12.50,USD,,,Square migration 2026-08
GC-4482-9919,100.00,USD,sam@example.com,,Square migration 2026-08

The notify column is deliberately empty on every row. The note column is the thing that saves you six months from now when someone asks which cards came from the old system.

Upload, read the preview, fix anything the preview flags, run five rows, test a checkout, then run the rest.

After the import

Export the created batch as a CSV and store it with your migration records. Then compare your total against the old platform’s outstanding liability report one more time. Two matching numbers is what lets you turn the old system off.

If you also want to move a loyalty or account-credit balance across, that is store credit rather than gift cards. See migrate store credit to Shopify.