Somewhere in your existing platform’s database sits a list of customers holding gift cards with real dollar balances, money they’ve already paid you, waiting to be redeemed. When you migrate to Shopify, that liability doesn’t disappear. If it gets lost, mishandled, or quietly dropped in the move, the first thing an affected customer will do is post about it publicly, and the second thing they’ll do is stop trusting your store.
This is one of the more commonly underestimated parts of a platform migration. Product catalogues, customer accounts and order history get most of the planning attention, while gift cards, a live financial liability, not just a data field, often get treated as an afterthought.
This post covers why gift card migration to Shopify is genuinely trickier than it looks, the practical steps to get it right, and what tends to go wrong when it’s rushed.
Why Shopify Gift Card Migration Isn’t a Simple Import
Shopify’s native gift card system is built around Shopify generating the gift card itself, either automatically when a customer purchases one from your store, or manually by a staff member creating one in the admin under Products > Gift cards. It isn’t designed as a bulk-import feature where you upload a spreadsheet of arbitrary existing codes and balances the way you might import a product CSV.
That distinction matters enormously when you’re migrating from Square, WooCommerce, a legacy POS system, or another ecommerce platform, because your existing gift cards already have:
- Specific codes customers know and may have printed, saved, or written down
- Specific remaining balances that represent a real financial obligation to honour
- Varying expiry rules, depending on your previous platform and, in some jurisdictions, minimum legal validity periods
To recreate that in Shopify with the original codes and exact balances intact, merchants typically need to use the Shopify Admin API (via its GraphQL gift card creation capability) or a dedicated bulk gift card import app from the Shopify App Store, rather than a plain CSV upload through the standard admin screens. This is a deliberate design choice on Shopify’s part, gift cards are financial instruments, so Shopify treats creating them with precision as an API/developer-level task rather than a casual bulk-upload one.
The practical implication: this isn’t something to leave to the week before cutover, and it isn’t something most merchants should attempt as a manual, one-by-one admin task if they have more than a handful of active balances outstanding.
Auditing Your Outstanding Gift Card Liability Before You Migrate
Before any technical work happens, you need an accurate picture of what you’re actually migrating.
- Export every active gift card from your current platform, including code, remaining balance, issue date and expiry (if any). Don’t rely on a rough estimate, pull the real, current data as close to your cutover date as reasonably possible, since balances change daily as customers redeem them.
- Reconcile the total outstanding balance against your accounting records. The sum of all active gift card balances should match the gift card liability figure your bookkeeping already tracks. If it doesn’t, resolve the discrepancy before migrating rather than after, it’s much harder to untangle once two systems both have partial records.
- Flag any unusual cases separately, cards with disputed balances, cards flagged as fraudulent, or cards close to an expiry rule that might change on the new platform.
- Decide on your GST treatment for gift cards, if you haven’t already documented it. In Australia, gift card sales are generally not subject to GST at the point of sale (GST applies when the card is redeemed against a taxable product), and this treatment needs to carry through consistently on the new platform.
This audit is tedious, but it’s the foundation everything else is built on, you cannot accurately migrate a liability you haven’t accurately measured.
Getting the Technical Migration Right
Once you have a clean, reconciled dataset, the actual migration generally follows this sequence:
- Choose your method, either a developer-built script using the Shopify Admin API to programmatically create gift cards with the original codes and balances, or a vetted bulk gift card import app if one supports your source platform and preserves original codes.
- Run a test batch first. Migrate a small sample, ten or twenty cards, not your whole list, into a Shopify test environment or development store before touching production. Confirm the codes, balances and any expiry dates came across exactly as expected.
- Test redemption end to end. Place a real test order using one of the migrated gift card codes and confirm the balance deducts correctly, the remaining balance displays correctly to the customer, and the transaction records properly in Shopify’s order and financial reports.
- Schedule the full migration close to cutover, ideally with your old platform’s gift card system frozen (no new purchases or redemptions) during the gap, so balances can’t drift between the export and the go-live.
- Reconcile again after migration. Total up the balances now live in Shopify and confirm the figure matches your pre-migration audit. Any mismatch needs to be investigated and resolved before you announce the new store is live, not weeks later when a customer complains their balance is wrong.
- Keep a permanent record of the migration mapping, old code, new Shopify code (if changed), original balance, migration date. If a customer ever disputes a balance months later, this is what lets you resolve it quickly instead of guessing.
Communicating the Migration to Customers
The technical migration can be flawless and you can still damage trust if customers are caught off guard. A short, proactive communication plan matters as much as the data work.
- Tell affected customers before cutover, not after. An email to anyone with an active gift card balance, explaining the store is moving to a new platform and their balance will carry over, heads off confusion and support tickets.
- Be specific about what changes and what doesn’t. If gift card codes are staying identical, say so clearly. If codes are changing (which sometimes happens depending on migration method), tell customers their new code directly rather than leaving them to discover it at checkout.
- Give a clear point of contact for anyone who tries to redeem a gift card during or immediately after the transition and hits an issue.
- Consider a short overlap or grace period where customer support can manually verify and honour a balance if the automated lookup has any teething issues in the first few days.
What Goes Wrong When This Is Rushed
Skipping or rushing this process tends to fail in a small number of predictable ways:
- Balances migrated incorrectly, a rounding error, a truncated export, or a script bug that assigns the wrong balance to a code. Customers notice immediately because it directly affects money they expected to have.
- Codes that don’t carry across, forcing customers to contact support just to redeem something they already paid for, a poor first impression of the new store.
- Liability quietly dropped because a batch of cards wasn’t included in the export, which is both a customer trust problem and, depending on the value involved, a real accounting and legal exposure.
- No reconciliation record, meaning that if a customer disputes a balance later, there’s no way to confirm who’s right.
None of these are exotic risks, they’re the ordinary failure modes of treating a financial migration like a simple data export.
There’s also a slower-burning version of this problem: a merchant migrates the bulk of gift card balances correctly but misses a smaller batch, cards issued through a promotion, a POS terminal, or a third-party channel that wasn’t part of the main export. Those balances don’t show up as an error on day one. They surface weeks or months later when a customer tries to redeem one and it doesn’t exist in the new system, which is a worse experience than an upfront issue because it looks like the balance was deliberately dropped rather than simply missed. This is exactly why the audit step matters more than it might seem, every source of gift card issuance in the old system needs to be accounted for, not just the obvious one.
When to Bring in a Specialist
Gift card migration sits in an unusual spot: it looks like a small technical detail next to bigger decisions like theme design or app selection, but it’s one of the few parts of a migration with direct financial and legal consequences if it’s wrong. Using the Shopify Admin API correctly, structuring a safe test-then-full-migration sequence, and building a reconciliation process that will hold up if a balance is ever disputed months later is exactly the kind of technical migration detail worth planning properly rather than leaving to chance during a platform switch. This is the kind of work we handle as part of our Shopify migration service, alongside the rest of the platform move.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I just re-issue new gift cards on Shopify instead of migrating the old codes?
You can, but it creates real friction, customers have to be told their old code no longer works and given a new one, which increases support volume and the chance someone misses the message and has a failed redemption. Migrating the original codes and balances directly is the smoother option when it’s feasible.
Does Shopify support gift cards on all plans?
Shopify’s native gift card feature is available as a standard product type across Shopify plans, though the exact bulk-issuance and API capabilities available to you can depend on your plan and app setup. If you’re unsure what your current plan supports, it’s worth confirming directly in your Shopify admin or with a specialist before planning the migration approach.
How far in advance of go-live should gift card migration be planned?
Treat it as part of your core migration timeline, not a last-minute task, the audit, reconciliation and test-batch steps take real time, and rushing them is exactly what causes balance errors. For most merchants, this should be planned alongside the rest of the technical migration, well before the final cutover date.
What happens to gift card GST treatment when I move platforms?
The underlying tax treatment doesn’t change because you’ve changed platforms, gift card sales are generally treated as unearned revenue rather than a taxable supply at the point of sale, with GST applying on redemption. What does need attention is making sure your new Shopify setup applies that treatment consistently, so it’s worth checking with your accountant or bookkeeper as part of the move.
What if I can’t find a reliable way to preserve exact gift card codes during migration?
If your source platform’s export is incomplete or a suitable import method isn’t available, the fallback is a manually verified process, reconciling balances individually and having support honour original codes against the record for a transition period. It’s more labour-intensive, but it protects customer trust better than dropping balances silently.
Ready to Migrate Without the Guesswork?
If gift card balances are one of the things holding up your Shopify migration plan, book a call with Nexly and we’ll help you map out a migration approach that keeps your liability accurate and your customers’ trust intact.
