For years, corporate gifting has been Zest’s bread and butter. We pushed the proverbial envelope for how corporate gifting is done on the internet. We brushed off the dusty old experience and made it possible for beloved DTC brands to offer self-service gifting (ahem, no need to fill out a contact form and wait for a support rep to get back to you) through dedicated gifting storefronts right on their site open to the public or made private for those VIP B2B clients.
Then we went a step further and heeded the call for tools to assuage the pains of high-touch corporate gifting: concierge gifting. Now, ecom brands could keep every detail of their white-glove gifts and high-value clients in one central, purpose-built platform instead of scattered across spreadsheets in the abyss of a Google Drive folder somewhere.
But while the industry of corporate gifting has continued to surge, growing roughly 8% year-over-year and cresting the $300 billion mark, another retail channel has been quietly coming into its own: consumer gifting.
Much like how corporate gifters craved the ability to buy 300 products for the company Christmas gift in a purchase journey as quick and convenient as shopping for themselves, the average consumer also wants that same ability on a smaller scale.
And now, with the launch of Zest Consumer Gifting, brands finally have the power to do just that.
Today we’re experiencing the perfect culmination of technology and consumer trends. There’s been a marked shift in shoppers’ gift-giving behavior, and for the first time ever, this new ‘tude can finally be met and encouraged with the tech to match.
So, if you’ve been wondering when to weave gifting into your tech stack, the answer is now.
Consumers and Online Shopping: A Love Story
Ecommerce is everywhere.
It’s no secret that ecommerce has firmly planted itself in our collective shopping habits (and it shan’t be leaving unless the internet shuts down entirely).
By 2029, it’s predicted that more than 97% of consumers in the US will be shopping online, which is pretty much everyone. And that’s no surprise when you consider that practically anything can be bought online from the comfort of your couch. Food, cars, CDs, home theaters — this list could literally go on forever.
Even though brick-and-mortar retail still reigns in America, ecommerce has chipped away at its kingdom. In Q1 2025, ecommerce accounted for just over 16% of total retail sales — or roughly 1 in 6 purchases.
In a nutshell, shopping online is no longer a luxury reserved for when the goods you wanted weren’t available in store. Instead, ecommerce has become a full-fledged shopping destination, nay, a shopping priority that’s in the average customer’s regular rotation.
We buy everything online, so why not gifts?
As the majority of products we could dream of buying are available online, it was only a matter of time before ecommerce brands became popular gifting destinations, especially around the big Q4 holidays.
In 2024, 71% of consumers planned on buying holiday gifts through online-only retailers. Compare that with only 55% of consumers stating they’ll be shopping at mass merchant retailers (and the depressing 31% of shoppers who said they’d be stopping by department stores), and it’s clear how much of an impact ecommerce has had on where we shop for gifts.
If we dig a little further, we learn that nearly half of people planned to finish their holiday shopping online in 2024, and people who planned to shop for gifts exclusively online was up a fat 24% over 2023.
The writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer: consumers are increasingly going to their favorite online brands to buy gifts.
This is amazing news for stores slinging highly giftable goods, but there’s one catch. The technology to make online gifting as easy, convenient, and accessible as typical DTC shopping has simply not existed.
Until now.
Gifting Tech Is Finally Meeting the Moment
The plight of buying gifts online.
Just like corporate gifting had been an arduous task for brands and shoppers in a pre-Zest world, so had consumer gifting.
Picture it: You’re an avid online shopper used to an ecosystem of easy site navigations, streamlined product selection, and one-click checkouts. And once you purchase, you just sit back and receive automatic tracking updates and personalized post-purchase emails all about your purchase and products.
Then one day, you want to send some goodies to your inner circle to thank them for being in your wedding party the week earlier. You head to your favorite brand to get the perfect thank-you gifts.
You’re cruising along, add seven items to your cart, and you slide into the checkout.
And then you realize: There’s no way to send these products to seven different addresses. There’s also no way to add personalized messages! So, now what?
That’s the rub for online gifting hopefuls. What started as a rock-solid CX has devolved into one full of friction. You can either go through the whole process of adding a product to the cart, entering an address, submitting payment details, and checking out seven times (and then send seven different thank-you cards by mail, hoping and praying they arrive around the same time as the gift).
Or you can do what many gifters do: give up.
When faced with too much online gifting friction, people are more likely to abandon their cart (or, in this case, many carts) and settle for a stack of gift cards from that one end cap at Walgreens. The intentional gift is out the window, the thoughtful moment becomes another generic gesture, and the magic of gifting is gone.
Zest Consumer Gifting meets the gifting demand head-on.
Our team had heard one question on repeat from our brand partners: Can you make my consumer gifting as easy as you’ve made corporate gifting?
And for a while, the answer was a depressed “no.”
(It’s a long, technical, nerdy story, but in order to make that work, we needed access to specific APIs, and Shopify had those locked down tightly.)
But not too long ago, Shopify announced new checkout extensibility, which means our team could finally build the consumer gifting tools that modern shoppers wanted directly in the Shopify checkout.
Seemingly overnight, Zest could finally build the full-bodied consumer gifting experience we’d envisioned since Day One. With this newfound access to customize Shopify Checkout for Shopify Plus brands, we launched Consumer Gifting. A suite of DTC gifting tools that powers serious gifting magic directly in the checkout flow:
- Zest Multiship lets shoppers send to multiple gift recipients in a single transaction.
- A personalized gift message can be written for each recipient.
- Zest Gift Notes enables stores to offer digital or printed gift messages in checkout.
- Shoppers can send tracking details directly to their recipients.
- Recipients can opt in to receive the gifted brand’s marketing emails or texts.
- Zest’s Klaviyo integration means brands can create hyper-personalized campaigns that speak to the gifting (or receiving) journey to encourage repeat gifting and urge gift recipients to become first-time customers.
- Brands finally have access to gifting revenue and insights to help them strategize, market, and scale this growing channel.
Zest Consumer Gifting is the first and only online gifting solution made for Shopify Checkout — no separate storefront, no non-Shopify-feeling CX, no clunky interface. It’s consumer gifting that’s now truly as intuitive and optimized as shopping for yourself.
Why Should Your Brand Get in on Gifting Now?
When Zest released its suite of corporate gifting features, it admittedly took time to get brands to try it out. After all, corporate gifting has always been done the same way, including a contact form, lots of back-and-forth emails, and weeks of manual processing time. Automating the whole process with self-service corporate gifting was a novel idea for most, and some wondered how it would work out.
Anecdotally, early adopters of Zest Corporate Gifting have blown year-over-year gift sales out of the water. Leading brands have doubled, even tripled, their corporate gift sales without growing their team headcount. They just needed the right tools to help them modernize the shopping journey and streamline their internal operations.
In other words, these brands are laughing all the way to the bank while competitors in their field are trying to catch up today.
Consumer gifting is no different.
The brands that make it ridiculously easy to gift their products directly from their checkout are simply seizing a massive opportunity to:
- Bring their consumer gifting experience out of the Stone Age and into modernity.
- Build loyalty and advocacy with shoppers who’ve been craving a better gifting flow.
- Get a leg up on competitors and offer something they don’t yet have.
- Tap an entirely new (hugely lucrative) sales channel during a time when new channels are hard to come by.
- Plant a flag in the ground as an innovative brand that’s truly listening to the needs of its customers.
- Have access, for the first time ever, to gift recipients of their products.
It’s an ecommerce strategy that will reward early movers and negatively impact brands that continue to ignore the online gifting movement.
2025 Is the Year of the Gift
Don’t let another holiday season slip by without a bump in gift sales YoY. Without the right technology, your online gifting experience could be doing more damage than you know.
Abandoned carts, frustrated shoppers, and tarnished reputations are hard to overcome when ecommerce competition is steeper than ever. Shoppers are going to go to the brands that make their lives easy, especially as online gifting behavior continues to mature.
If you’ve been contemplating when to invest in your store’s gifting channel, the shoppers have spoken: Now.
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