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With gifting turned on, a customer can send an order to somebody else, with a message, a date not to deliver before, and a date the recipient is told about it. Turn it on with Let customers buy gifts under Settings > Cart & Checkout.

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At checkout

The delivery step opens with Who is this for?, offering Myself or Someone else. Choosing Someone else collects the recipient’s delivery address, then asks This is a gift. Answering yes adds a step for:
  • The recipient’s name, and who the gift is from
  • A gift message
  • Their email address, where the gift is something the recipient needs to hear about
  • Tell them on - the date the recipient is contacted
  • Deliver after - the earliest date the parcel may go
All of the wording on these steps is yours to change, under Settings > Branding & Web Components > Checkout.
“Who is this for?” is deliberately broader than “is this a gift?”, because it also covers sending something to your own office. The gift question comes second, and only once the customer has said the order is for someone else.

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What’s collected, and when

  • A gift of physical goods alone needs no recipient email. Nothing is sent to the recipient and no account is created for them. The message travels in the box.
  • A gift subscription does need one, because an account is created for the recipient so they can manage their deliveries. Checkout refuses a gift subscription with nobody to send it to.
  • A gift voucher carries its own recipient and send date on the voucher itself. See Selling vouchers.

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Billing and delivery

Billing stays with the buyer and delivery goes to the recipient. The buyer is the order’s customer, so your order list, exports and reporting still show who actually paid.
An order goes to one destination. The recipient details and the end-of-term choice are asked once, for the whole order, rather than per line.

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The recipient as a customer

Where a gift needs one, the recipient is created as an ordinary customer, with the delivery address attached to them. An existing customer gifted a case at their office never has their own default delivery address repointed. The gift address is only made their default when they had none at all.

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Deliver after

Deliver after becomes the order’s shipping date, so it holds the parcel everywhere a shipping date is honoured: order processing, courier submission and held-order releases.
Only physical dispatch is held. A gift voucher defers itself through its own send date, so a voucher-only order takes no shipping date at all.
Where a gift subscription’s first shipment already has a dispatch day, the later of the two dates wins. The shipment schedule says the soonest a parcel can go, and the gift date says the soonest it may.

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Tell them on

The reveal date is when the recipient hears about the gift, and nothing reaches them before it: not at purchase, and not when the order is confirmed. A gift bought in November for Christmas stays quiet for six weeks. The email goes out at eight in the morning in the shop’s own timezone, rather than whenever the overnight jobs happen to run.
A reveal date can’t land after the delivery date. There’s no point telling somebody about a gift that has already turned up on their doorstep, so checkout refuses the combination.

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On the order

A gift order carries a Gift options block on its detail page:
  • For and From
  • Their email
  • Tell them on
  • Deliver after
  • When it ends - for a gift subscription, what the giver chose to happen at the end of the prepaid term
  • Gift message

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Turning gifting off

Turning Let customers buy gifts off only stops new gifts being bought. Gift subscriptions already running keep delivering for the rest of their term, and the people receiving them still get their emails.

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Next steps

Gift subscriptions

Prepaid terms, reveal dates and what happens when a gift runs out

Gift vouchers

Sell stored-value codes customers can spend later

Cart & Checkout

Turn gifting on and set the delivery date option