Gift card sales continue to rise in UK, despite weak consumer environment

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Mar 5, 2019

​The UK gift card market is continuing to grow and support the UK retail market, despite the challenging retail conditions, according to the latest industry report from the UK Gift Card & Voucher Association (UKGCVA).

Produced by accountancy and business advisory firm BDO, the report shows an “overall promising picture” with year-on-year growth of 10.73%.

Gift card sales rose across retail, experiential and third-party supplier sectors, with store branded cards showing “particularly impressive growth at 16.64% for the period.” This was driven by an increase of 33% through the business-to-business (B2B) channel and 4.5% through the consumer sales channel. 

Within the consumer sales channel, which includes gift card malls, online sales and sales of store branded gift cards sold direct from retailers’ own stores, gift card malls once again saw the greatest increase, although no figure was given. 

But that’s no surprise as direct sales from retailers’ own stores are still where the majority of gift cards are purchased, accounting for 75.62% of all consumer sales. So growth of ‘only’ 4.7% for this part of the sector in the period is understandable as it’s harder to expanded fast when the channel already accounts for most sales.

Digital gift cards are also increasing in popularity and experienced the highest growth in the second half of 2018, when compared to paper and physical cards, the report said, although again, it didn’t give an exact figure.