First Data released its First Half Gift Card Payments Report, which, not surprisingly reports on gift card sales for the first half of 2010. At quick-service restaurants, the dollar value of gift cards jumped 14.0 percent and the number of gift cards sold rose 12.4 percent in the first six months of 2010, compared with […]
Archive for the ‘Trends & Statistics’ Category
According to this article in the Los Angeles Times, about 8-10% of small businesses today offer gift cards, up from 2% two years ago. The costs of setting up to offer gift cards can be as low as $800 plus a small monthly fee. Many small business owners report selling many more gift cards than […]
It is always interesting to compare the perspective of industry trade groups with those of consumers, consumer advocates, and legislators. Take for instance this article, which talks about the new gift card rules and their effect on the prepaid card industry. The article quotes the Network Branded Prepaid Card Association. By the NBPCA‘s estimate, more […]
I am always suspicious about survey results when a survey is performed by an industry group. But the recent Graduation Consumer Intentions and Actions survey done by the National Retail Federation has me scratching my head because it carries a less favorable spin. According to the survey, almost 60% of people who will give a […]
Google trends is great for tracking the frequency of search terms over time. Reports from industry analists put gift card sales down only moderately (5%) for the last two holiday seasons, but searching Google Trends for “gift cards” gives us a different picture, with traffic declining what appears to be about 30-40% from the peak […]
www.giftcardconverter.co.uk is the first UK focused gift card site I’ve seen. An interesting tidbit in the article about this site is the claim that up to 25% of gift cards in the UK are unspent. The site will buy cards, trade them, or customers can donate them to charity. Cards donated to charity do not […]
According to this obvious PR-based article, prepaid debit and gift cards are already a huge hit for online purchases ($12 billion for prepaid and $2 billion for gift cards in 2009) and are set to explode to $38 billion for prepaids and $6 billion for gift cards by 2014, representing almost 10% of online sales. What […]
There is some speculation that the use of gift cards may have been a reason behind January’s modest sales growth over 2009. (article) That means people are smarter and are using up their cards faster.
At least in the UK, open-loop cards apparently grew by 70% in the 4th quarter as compared to the same quarter in 2008, while closed-loop gift cards were up only moderately at 2.8%.
According to a recent article, PlasticJungle (a gift card trading site) claims that there are $30 Billion worth of unredeemed gift card in consumers hands.
Gift card issuers like to claim that gift cards are the most popular gift. Cashstar, a company that manages digital gift card networks for retailers, recently shared some trends that point out that gift cards may be popular, but they are most often the gift of LAST resort, not first choice. My interpretation – people often […]
To keep abreast of new information related to gift cards one of the tools I use is Google Alerts which monitors news articles and blog postings for keywords. The last month or two, a majority of the articles I have come across have been negative towards gift cards in one way or another, either related […]
The latest Tower Group report on gift card sales has some interesting numbers of open-loop vs. closed-loop gift cards. According to their research, open-loop will be half of closed-loop for 2009, at $29 billion and $58 billion respectively. I had thought open-loop gift cards were nearing about the same sales as closed-loop.
In a two-part interview (part one, part two), a spokesperson from the Blackhawk Network, a division of Safeway that operates the Gift Card Mall service found in Safeway and other locations, has some interesting prognostications for gift cards this holiday season. Going along with other industry insiders, they predict growing sales for gift cards, whereas every […]
The Tower Group expects gift card sales to drop 7% from last years sales, which are down from 2008 levels. Even the National Retail Federation reports that gift card spending will drop this holiday season. Most commonly cited reason: gift cards are too impersonal. And the Wall Street Journal and Time Magazine (among many others) feature articles […]
I’ve come across two surveys recently that predict different results for gift card spending this holiday season. The first survey, from Archstone Consulting Group predicts flat sales to sales dropping by 5%, which seems like a logical conclusion given the state of the economy. This is similar to what they predicted last year and they were […]
As these survey results seem to indicate, consumers don’t really understand the true costs or fees associated with open-loop (Visa/MasterCard) gift cards. Probably the most understated result is the question where 17 percent said they had trouble spending the remaining amount on their card because a merchant refused to split the transaction across multiple payment types. […]
Here is an interesting article that look at when a gift card expires to how likely we are to spend it vs let it go to waste.
According to a recent report, the holiday outlook for gift cards spending is flat to down 5%. At $24 billion for just the holiday season, that is still a lot. The good news is that people are focusing more on using gift cards for essentials; hopefully this means that they are also keeping better track of […]
Google Trends is a nifty tool that allows you to see the relatve frequency with which a search term appears historically in Google searches. Google Trends shows this frequency map for the term “gift cards” This pretty much tells us what we alrady know, gift cards are HUGELY a holiday phenomonon and have been steadily […]
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