Gift Cards

As you may have noticed, gift cards have recently become a crucial and extremely popular aspect of retail businesses. In recent years, gift cards have been ranked as the second most given gift by consumers in the United States. By relieving the donor of the sometimes worrisome duty of selecting specific gifts, these gift cards have become a modern sensation, with billions of dollars’ worth of gift cards bought annually in just the United States alone. They have become a key ingredient in business’ acquiring new customers and new sales.

As retailers move parts of their business online and try to maximize their profits through targeted web promotions and campaigns, the question arises of how we might bring the successes of gift cards into the eCommerce experience. The ease at which customers can buy, use, and gift these cards therefore becomes massively important in designing the right online gift card. Making sure that customers could enjoy the same level of experience in buying, using, and gifting these gift cards both in-store and online was our challenge.

We here at Desato believe in efficiency and simplicity. In order to make Lane Crawford’s online gift cards as accessible and easy to use as the physical cards, we had to find a way to have both the physical and digital gift cards sync up. The solution was to have both online and physical stores communicate with the same backend system, allowing gift card information to seamlessly sync while customers are purchasing or using the gift card at any of Lane Crawford’s stores. The Oracle ATG multi-site functionality is also incorporated so that customers worldwide can enjoy using gift cards online.