Four years ago, Jeremy and I started Zest with a simple observation. The entire ecommerce ecosystem is hyperfocused on optimizing the standard shopping-for-myself checkout experience. But brands with giftable products and their gift-buying customers remain surprisingly overlooked.
Want to send something to a friend but don't know their address? You’ll need to ruin the surprise and text them first.
Need to send a gift to 100 clients or employees? Good luck checking out 100 times with 100 different addresses (or, if you’re lucky, filling out a “Contact Us” page and not knowing when you’ll hear back).
This isn't just inconvenient—it's a massive missed opportunity. Gifting represents a real portion of ecommerce transactions, yet the infrastructure to support it has been stuck in the ‘90s. Forms, back-and-forth emails, or repeat transactions add up to friction that kills conversions at the moment of peak buyer intent.
For brands, that means leaving money on the table, especially since gift purchases typically have higher average order values than regular purchases. For customers, that means enduring a shopping flow that’s worlds apart from what they’re used to, causing bad experiences and even worse impressions.
Something had to change.
We Started With Corporate Gifting
We've gotten pretty good at helping brands grow their B2B gifting sales. We turned a painful process of contact forms, spreadsheets, and weeks of processing for every order into something that works for everybody—brands and their customers—with Gifting Storefronts and Concierge Order Management.
The results speak for themselves. We’ve helped brands like Levain, Brightland, and Dandelion Chocolate grow their corporate gifting sales by 100%, 86%, and 79% year-over-year respectively.
Introducing Zest for Consumer Gifting
As our roster of brand partners grew, one question kept coming up. Just as Zest for Corporate Gifting made it simple to send to 100 clients in one checkout, could we apply the same idea to consumer gifting and simplify sending gifts to five friends or family members?
The challenge? Unlike corporate gifting, where a separate buying portal dedicated to corporate customers makes sense, consumer gifters expect a seamless experience within their normal shopping journey and checkout.
In order to build a DTC gifting experience that lives within Shopify Checkout, we needed access to modify those pages—a capability that wasn’t available for the majority of Zest’s existence.
Things started to shift when Shopify announced checkout extensibility. It wasn't immediate—we had to wait for the right capabilities—but eventually we had what we needed to build the experience we'd envisioned since day one of Zest. (Thank you, Shopify!)
Today, I'm thrilled to announce that Zest's consumer gifting solution is live for Shopify Plus brands: the first and only multi-recipient checkout solution built for Shopify Checkout.
Here’s how it works. Customers shop normally, add products to their cart, and seamlessly send to multiple recipients in one checkout. Plus, it all works out-of-the-box with existing discount codes, shipping rules, and payment methods.
It’s a checkout flow akin to the hyper-optimized DTC Shopify checkout experience that is the gold standard today, enhanced by Zest’s signature digital gifting features that surprise and delight recipients.
With Zest Consumer Gifting, recipients can:
- Open up personalized digital gift notes complete with package tracking details (no more "Where's my gift?" messages).
- Engage with brands and convert into high-value email subscribers (these aren't cold leads—they're customers who just received and enjoyed your product). For example, imagine getting steaks from Good Ranchers and automatically receiving cooking tips.
- Send thank-you notes back to the gifter instantly for a more memorable gifting moment.
Watch this 60-second demo to see the magic in action, or see it live on partners like Caroline’s Cakes, David’s Cookies, UNTUCKit, and ChappyWrap.
The launch of Zest’s Consumer Gifting features turns this channel into a truly accessible growth opportunity for more brands than ever. Before today, Zest has been synonymous with corporate gifting—and for good reason. But just as brands can continue to lean on Zest to scale and dominate their B2B growth, now they can do the same with the entirety of their customer base. In essence, brands that care about consumer gifting and tapping this growing market now have the power to do so.
We’re Just Getting Started
What started as an idea to simply make gifting better has turned into a comprehensive gifting platform helping brands finally optimize this experience for all of their customers—DTC, B2B, and everyone in-between.
Just a few short years ago, buying personalized, thoughtful gifts online as quickly and easily as buying something for yourself was out of reach. But today, with the best tools now at your fingertips, gifting has the potential to be ecommerce’s most lucrative channel.
This is a massive milestone in shaping this industry and how people shop for gifts. As for Zest, the roadmap ahead is dotted with projects that make gifting an even stronger acquisition channel, deliver invaluable insight into the gifting channel, and weave it even further into an online brand’s full-funnel tech stack.
If you're a brand selling giftable products, optimizing your checkout for gifting shouldn't be an afterthought. We've built the tools to help you capture the opportunity—whether you're focused on corporate sales, consumer gifting, or both.
The holiday gifting season is coming up and the window to prepare is closing fast. Let’s talk and make sure you can unwrap what’s possible in 2025.
— Alex
