InComm Data: Digital Gift Cards Strong in Holiday ’13 (Feb. 3, 2014)
Digital gift cards were a hot item during the 2013 holiday season and got even more popular than plastic as Christmas neared, according to data from prepaid services provider InComm. The company’s data—aggregated from gift card sales through the Websites of InComm’s retailer clients—revealed that 57 percent of consumers purchased a digital gift card in the month of December. Meanwhile, only 43 percent of shoppers purchased physical gift cards during the same month. Notably, digital gift card sales spiked during the six days leading up to Christmas; 80 percent of the gift cards purchased within that period were digital, compared to just 20 percent that were plastic.
“Our own internal holiday data reveal the increased sales opportunities created by offering digital in addition to physical cards. These numbers demonstrate how brands benefit when they open up gift card sales through all channels,” said Mike Fletcher, senior vice president of sales and marketing for InComm, digital solutions.
The InComm report also noted that during Black Friday, location-based shopping app shopkick delivered nearly seven times its usual daily volume of digital gift cards using InComm Digital Solutions platform. Shopkick enables users to earn points for simply walking into a brick-and-mortar retail store (users earn extra points for making purchases). The points can then be redeemed for a variety of rewards, including digital gift cards. The increased demand for digital gift cards from Black Friday shoppers underscored the rising popularity of digital cards and is in line with a recent InComm survey in which 70 percent of respondents said they were more interested in purchasing digital gift cards now than they were two or three years ago, according to the company.
