If you're running an ecommerce brand and haven't yet ushered your online gifting experience into the 2020s, you're leaving serious revenue on the table.
While online brands have spent decades carefully optimizing their standard shopping journey — from product discovery to one-click checkout to super personalized post-purchase emails — there's one experience that's been totally ignored: gifting.
People have been buying gifts online since the moment ecommerce took hold of the internet, but the experience has remained frustratingly clunky, time-consuming, and dusty. For the most part, the online gifting experience today isn’t much different than if you were dialing up and buying gifts in the mid-90s. (And what other part of the online shopping experience can you say that about?)
Your customers want to send thoughtful presents to friends, family, clients, and colleagues, but they’re stuck navigating checkout flows designed for personal purchases and only personal purchases. But as ecommerce marches on, this glaring gap represents one of the biggest untapped growth opportunities in ecommerce — and 2026 is your year to unwrap what’s possible.
Your Gifting Channel Is a Growth Goldmine
Maybe you’ve never really thought about gifting in the context of a growth channel before. Maybe group gifting or concierge services have always just been seen as a “nice to have” perk slated for the distant future.
Or, what we hear most often from brands in your shoes, you have thought a great deal about gifting, but the right tech hasn’t existed to help you tap the market and scale in a sustainable way. Maybe you’ve even been trying your best to offer gifting options to your shoppers, but you’ve been strapped by the sheer amount of time it takes to coordinate and process orders going to multiple people.
If those scenarios sound too familiar, it can feel easy to just give up on gifting and continue focusing on your typical DTC shopping experience. Before you go that route, consider the goldmine you’d be passing up.
Brands that have invested in dedicated gifting solutions are seeing real results. Companies like Levain Bakery have grown corporate gift sales by 100% year-over-year, while Brightland increased corporate gift revenue by 86%, and Dandelion Chocolate saw a 79% boost in Q4 gifting revenue — all by tapping modern tech and making it easier for customers to buy and send gifts to one or tons of people. These brands have seen an ROI that crushed expectations, and because they adopted a modern gifting platform before their competition, they’re set to just keep on scaling.
These trailblazing DTC brands were on a mission to meet growing gifting demand, while optimizing the gifting experience as a whole, and tap this channel as a real path to long-term growth. Lucky for them, new tools have finally come out to help modern brands meet gifting demands head on. How serendipitous.
These brands aren't outliers. They're proof that when you remove friction from the gifting experience, demand follows. Consumer interest in online gifting surged 80% between 2019 and 2020, and that habit is here to stay. The global gift industry — corporate and consumer — is hundreds of billions of dollars in size with pure growth in the forecast.
If your brand sells highly giftable goods with no optimized purchase experience, you’re leaving money on the table. And when shoppers see your competitors offering optimized gifting checkouts, even the fiercest amount of loyalty won’t be enough to keep them from switching.
Take Advantage of The Gifting Flywheel Effect
One of the most powerful reasons to invest in gifting is what we call the “gifting flywheel,” aka self-scaling cycle of gifting channel growth.
Here's how it works: When buying gifts becomes effortless, more people purchase them. When more people receive gifts from your brand, more individuals experience your products firsthand (and, probably, for the first time). When these recipients have a purely delightful experience with your brand and products, they're more likely to become customers themselves and share your brand with others on their own.
In short, each gift sold is a new customer acquisition opportunity — and it’s one that comes with a built-in endorsement from someone the recipient already trusts, like their employer, a friend, or a family member.
It’s coveted word-of-mouth marketing at scale, happening totally organically with every gift transaction. When integrated thoughtfully with the rest of your ecommerce tech stack, gifting shifts from afterthought or “nice to have” to wildly lucrative channel in its own right.
Ditch Ads and Diversify Your Revenue Streams
Over the past two years, customer acquisition costs in the ecommerce space have painfully surged over 40%, and in an ad-saturated world, return on ad spend has all but bottomed out.
In 2026, analysts expect customer acquisition costs to continue on that trend and be higher than ever, which means relying solely on the DTC channels of yore is getting tougher to justify (or fund entirely).
If you’re wondering what else exists outside of ads that puts your stuff in front of new shoppers, it’s time to think beyond an outdated playbook. What worked well for your store in 2015 has changed, and it’s time to explore other opportunities.
Gifting offers brands a way to diversify revenue streams while reaching entirely new audiences without burning heaps of cash on ads with diminishing returns. Corporate gifting alone represents a massive opportunity, with businesses constantly seeking thoughtful ways to recognize employees, thank clients, and celebrate milestones, and it’s one of the fastest growing markets today.
For the year ahead, it’s a dangerous move to not touch your ecommerce dials. Instead, 2026 is a time to seriously consider cutting away any rotting channels while looking for new (and innovative) ways to grow. Meeting modern consumer gifting behaviors head-on is a foolproof way to tap new channels, outpace your competitors, and find a new way to grow long-term.
But how does a brand even get started?
Modern gifting platforms finally exist to help brands serve both consumer and B2B markets directly from their website (not a third-party marketplace). Your customers can easily send a single gift to their grandmother or coordinate gifts for hundreds of conference attendees — all through seamless, self-service experiences that don't require your team to manage spreadsheets or lengthy back-and-forth email threads.
Capture Year-round Revenue, Not Just Holiday Spikes
While gifting naturally peaks during the holidays, optimized gifting channels drive sales throughout the year. Of course, gift purchases naturally surge in Q4, with significant activity continuing right up to Christmas Eve, but the truth is that gifting occasions happen every day of the year.
Birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, thank-you gestures, new hire packages, company milestones, and sympathy gifts don't follow a seasonal calendar, and with the best tools on your side, your brand is set to capture them all.
By making gifting easy and accessible year-round, brands can smooth out revenue fluctuations and turn what was once an exhausting Q4 phenomenon into a consistent growth channel. Whether it's Mother's Day, graduation season, or National Boss's Day, there's always a reason for customers to give.
Meet Modern Shopper Expectations and Behaviors
Today's consumers expect seamless experiences in every interaction.
They can book international travel, order groceries, buy a car, and manage their finances all from their phones. But buying gifts online? Well, it often feels like stepping back in time as they either have to:
1) navigate the logistics and costs of collecting recipient addresses and sending gifts all on their own, or
2) endure filling out long contact forms, unpredictable timelines, clunky address collection, and limited customization options that create friction and lead to abandoned carts.
Modern gifting solutions solve these pain points with features like:
- checkouts made specifically for gifting to one or hundreds of people in a single transaction.
- automatic gift order processing that meets customer timelines.
- the ability to send gifts instantly or schedule delivery ahead of time.
- digital gift delivery via link, text, or email.
- customizable gift messages.
- optional gift add-ons, like handwritten notes, gift wrap, and more.
- seamless, and even hands-free, recipient address collection.
- the ability to let recipients swap items for different sizes, colors, or preferences.
When the gift-buying experience is intuitive and downright delightful, conversion rates improve dramatically (and you can bet your customers will come back to your store the next time they need to gift).
Close the Technical Gap Without More Overhead
For years, the lack of gifting-specific ecommerce tools meant brands had to either build costly, complex custom solutions or settle for time-consuming workarounds. With tools like Zest, all of that's changed.
Purpose-built gifting platforms now integrate seamlessly with major ecommerce systems, enabling brands to offer fully optimized gifting experiences without massive development (or cash) investments.
These platforms handle the once-dreaded complexity with ease — multiship checkouts, bulk uploads, invoicing, processing, concierge order management, post-purchase tracking, and beyond — all while maintaining your brand's look, feel, and core CX. The result is a super modern, ultra-optimized gifting channel that can scale from one gift to thousands without overwhelming your operations team.
Now that the best tools exist to grow your gifting channel, there’s no excuse not to in 2026.
The Competitive Advantage
Most importantly, the fact remains that many of your competitors likely haven’t optimized their gifting experience yet. Either they haven’t realized the consumer shift, or they simply don’t know about modern gifting tech. Either way, now’s the time to get ahead and snag more of your shared customers.
Seizing this window of opportunity differentiates your brand and captures market share with ease. When customers have a great gifting experience with your brand, they’ll remember it and return for future gift-giving occasions every time, leaving your competition playing catch-up long after you’ve started growing this channel.
2026 Is Your Year to Grow With Gifting
Online gifting isn't just about adding a tacked-on gift note option at checkout. It's about recognizing that gifting is a fundamentally different shopping journey with unique needs, pain points, and opportunities for consumers and corporate clients alike.
Brands that invest in creating exceptional gifting experiences in 2026 will unlock new revenue streams, acquire customers more efficiently, and build stronger brand loyalty this year and every year moving forward.
So, the question now isn't whether to invest in your gifting channel or not — it's how soon can you make it happen? Because while you're reading this, your future customers are out there right now, searching for the perfect gift. Will they find an experience worth sharing?
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