How to issue Shopify gift cards in multiple currencies

The default nobody chose

If your store’s base currency is USD and you create a gift card in Shopify admin, that card is a USD card. That is true for a customer in Ohio and equally true for a customer in Munich.

For the Munich customer this means the card’s face value is a number they have to convert in their head, and at checkout the applied amount will not match what the card says. It works. It just feels broken, and it generates a support email every time.

Denominate, do not convert

The instinct is to convert: $50 becomes €46.12. Do not do that. Set a price per market the way you would for a product.

Market	Card value	Why
US	$50	Base
UK	£40	Round, reads as a real gift amount
EU	€45	Round, roughly parity with the US card
CA	$65 CAD	Round, not $68.31

The point of a gift card is that someone hands it to another person. €46.12 is not a gift, it is a refund.

Doing it in bulk

With Bulk Gift Cards the currency lives in the CSV:

amount,currency,customer_email,notify,note
50.00,USD,,,Q4 promo US
40.00,GBP,,,Q4 promo UK
45.00,EUR,,,Q4 promo EU
65.00,CAD,,,Q4 promo CA

One upload, four markets. The preview shows each row’s currency before anything is created, which is where you catch the blank cells that would otherwise fall back to your base currency.

The category gap

This is worth knowing if you are shopping for an app. Of the twelve bulk gift card tools on the Shopify App Store, ten do not mention currency anywhere in their listing or feature list. That is not usually a deliberate omission, it is that the apps were built for single-market stores and never revisited.

If you sell in more than one currency, this is the first question to ask an app, not the last. See the best Shopify bulk gift card apps breakdown for who supports what.