Top Takeaways to Unwrap
- Gifting isn't the best strategy for every brand. Before investing in online gifting platforms like Zest, mull over key factors for fit including your main gifting intent (corporate, consumer, or event), ecommerce platform compatibility, product giftability, and existing gifting traction.
- The top three industries that excel with online gifting platforms are wine, specialty foods, and gift baskets. Some brands experience 30-200% year-over-year growth in gift sales after tapping gifting-specific tools.
- Giftable products share common traits. The most successful gifting products elicit joy, provide an experience, are functional or memorable, and represent nice-to-have items people wouldn't typically buy for themselves but would love to receive as gifts.
- Gifting platforms solve ecommerce scalability challenges. Even inherently giftable industries struggle with manual processes (spreadsheets, lengthy email exchanges, contact forms) before using a platform like Zest to streamline both self-service and concierge gifting experiences, empowering brands to "sell gifts while they sleep."
Running your direct-to-consumer (DTC) company can leave you feeling like a mad scientist.
In modern ecommerce, there are hundreds of levers at your disposal to help start, run, and scale your online store. And many times, you’re picking a few at once and running experiments day in and day out, hoping anything sticks.
From tried-and-true email marketing to paid ads to influencer partnerships, it’s hard to know which growth channel will resonate with your audience and truly take your store to the next level. And if you do find That One Thing that makes sales spike, you’re left wondering if the spike was a fluke or if it really is something you can replicate and sustain.
The truth is, growth channels are not one-size-fits-all. In other words, what works for one brand might not work for another. At Zest, we know gifting isn’t the best growth channel for every ecommerce industry (as much as we wish it was!).
So, if you’ve been eyeballing online gifting as your next great experiment, read this first to see if your brand seems like a good fit.
What Kinds of Brands Are Best Fits for Online Gifting Platforms?
Before we dig into specifics, let’s look at a few general criteria we look over when chatting with brands about their fit with a tool like Zest. After all, as much as we’d love every brand on the World Wide Web to be slingin’ gifts left and right, it’s a fact that some verticals are simply less giftable than others (and we have the numbers to show us that).
When starting conversations with prospective gifting brands, we ask a few core questions:
- What kind of gifting are you interested in offering: corporate, consumer, event, or all three?
- What ecommerce platform do you use?
- What product category does your brand fall in?
- Have you already seen some gifting traction or are you just getting started?
Let’s run down these Q’s and why they matter when considering Zest for your gifting platform.
What kind of gifting are you interested in offering: corporate, consumer, event, or all three?
All gifting journeys are created equal, right? Well…not quite.
If you’re just starting to seriously consider gifting as a growth channel for your online store, you might not know the nuances of why your customers send your products as gifts yet.
Before implementing Zest, we’ll ask you to consider which gifting intent you’re trying to capture. This is a gentle nudge for brands to consider their audience and their product. For instance, do you see a lot of bulk orders being placed to one address? Event gifting might be your area of focus. On the other hand, if you see one person ordering the same product to different addresses over several transactions, corporate or consumer gifting may be a better investment.
Zest powers all of these gifting paths through different products — Corporate, Consumer, and Event. Each product functions differently in terms of different variables, like:
- customer entry point, e.g., cart, checkout, product description page, etc.
- number of different products being sent
- quantity of each product being sent
- self-service versus concierge checkout
Your store’s gifting path may evolve and expand over time, especially as you learn more about your shoppers and their gifting patterns, but it’s important to consider which product you want to start with (instead of wasting a bunch of dough on gifting tools that may not be the best fit).
What ecommerce platform do you use?
A seamless gift checkout experience is one that plays nicely with your existing ecommerce ecosystem. And as you know, each ecom platform is just a liiiittle bit different. Some systems are very flexible, allowing for customer apps or add-ons to help you fine-tune your unique customer experience. And others are simply not as dynamic as you need them to be to accommodate the changes you want to make.
When it comes to Zest, the usual suspects — Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Salesforce, Commerce7 — are all compatible with our corporate and event gifting features. Gift Notes and Multiship Checkout, on the other hand, are currently only compatible with Shopify Plus.
If you’re using or planning to migrate to Shopify Plus, Zest’s full gifting suite is at your fingertips. However, if Shopify Plus is not in your plans, Zest is here to power just your corporate and event gifting flows.
What product category does your brand fall in?
When you’re first starting to explore the ecommerce gifting landscape and wondering if it’s a good move for your online brand, the best first step is to assess how truly giftable your products are.
Do your products elicit joy and delight? Are they memorable? Do they provide a bit of an experience? Are they functional or useful? Are they a nice-to-have that people wouldn’t often splurge on for themselves, but they’d love to receive them as a gift?
A great place to start in understanding how giftable your products are is to host a survey or focus group. Interviewing real people about how they would feel if they received your different gifting contenders can help you gauge if this is the right channel to pursue.
Related to how giftable your products are is the question of who would like to receive your products as gifts. Understanding the context in which your products are gifted will also help guide you toward which gifting intent to focus on. For example, makeup is an awesome gift for besties to send one another via one-to-one consumer gifting, but it’d be weird for the CEO of a company to send a palette of eye shadow to their staff via one-to-many corporate gifting.
If you determine your products aren’t the greatest gift in the world, that’s OK! Like we said, gifting isn’t for every brand, and knowing this about your brand will help guide your strategy in a more impactful direction overall.
Have you already seen some gifting traction or are you just getting started?
Coming into the gifting conversation with a baseline sense of your current gifting activity is a huge bonus. This tidbit will help determine if 1) gifting is the right growth lever at your company’s current size, and 2) which gifting product is going to best meet your store’s needs.
If your company drowns in corporate gift orders every Q4, Zest Corporate is the perfect fuel to help you sustainably scale a channel with proven demand. Conversely, if you don’t do much corporate gifting and you’re unsure how much consumer gifting happens, a lighter-weight tool like Gift Notes may be a good starting point to help you gauge your customers’ gifting appetite and understand this channel for your business a bit more before jumping in with both feet.
Ecommerce Industries That See Massive Growth With Zest Gifting
Now that you know some foundational questions to ask yourself before diving headfirst into the world of gifting, let’s look at some verticals that do especially well gifting as a growth channel.
Wine, alcohol, and non-alcoholic spirits
Client recognition, housewarmings, birthdays, anniversaries — one of the top gifts for celebrating a moment or milestone is a special li’l something to drink.
A handsome bottle of cab sauv is classy, well-received (if the recipient partakes, that is), and seen as a thoughtful, high-quality gift. But whether you’re considering gifting a fancy-shmancy bottle of wine, whisky, or non-alc aperitif, rest assured that you can’t really go wrong when you add gifting-specific purchase journeys to your checkout flow.
Beverage brands tap Zest to power all types of online gifting. Some brands lean heavily into Concierge Project Management tools while others cut their in-house manual workload through Self-service Storefronts.
Companies in the wine and beverage industry typically see gift sale growth in their first holiday season with Zest, while brands that have been using Zest for more than one year can expect to see anywhere between 30% – 75% year-over-year growth through their Zest-powered channels.
"Gifting orders were pretty much always high-touch and handled over the course of several calls and emails. Now, we can sell gifts while we sleep, which we see happen all the time!"
— Katie Taylor, Gifting & Subscriptions Sales Manager, Clif Family Winery
Specialty foods
Another top gifting go-to is pretty much anything that’s edible. Luxury olive oil, artisanal chocolates, Grade A meats, gourmet baked goods are some of the most popular presents we see processed through Zest, and the reason is obvious.
Giving the gift of a delicious snack is an absolutely indulgent experience few people are willing to splurge on for themselves. The gift of food gives recipients permission to kick back and snack away, which is, in a way, priceless.
Food is also an entire experience. Eating something downright delicious isn’t just enjoyable — it also has a habit of eliciting emotions and activating neural pathways. For gifters looking to make a memorable impact, a top-tier food gift could guarantee you win a spot in the recipient’s mind for life.
And for brands looking to use gifting as a customer acquisition strategy, you’re in luck. The more people who receive your tasty products as gifts can’t help but think, “I loved every bite of this and want to give others that experience” the next time they need to send a gift of their own (and so starts the gifting flywheel).
Specialty food is highly giftable in any scenario. Consumers gift single items to friends and family, happy couples-to-be order bulk gifts as wedding favors, and corporate gifters snatch up food gifts for entire organizations and client rosters.
Don’t take just our word for it, though. In its first year using Zest, Dandelion Chocolate saw a 79% boost in Q4 corporate gifting, and icon Levain Bakery doubled year-over-year corporate gift sales (with customers spending nearly 20% more per recipient versus other channels).
By the end of the 2025 holiday season, it wasn’t unusual for specialty food brands using Zest to garner 200% year-over-year corporate gifting growth, proving the power of an optimized gifting experience for online shoppers.
Gift boxes and baskets
Stepping outside the arena of consumables, brands dealing in gift boxes and baskets round out our top three industries finding success with ecommerce gifting.
While gift baskets can certainly contain delicious snacks and bevvies, the allure of this gift is the perfect curation of goods within each carefully wrapped package. The best gift boxes include high-quality things you can eat and things you can use or keep for the long-haul.
For example, a gift basket containing a bottle of champagne alongside sparklers, artisanal truffles, and two fancy-pants coupes makes for both instant and long-term enjoyment.
(And if you’re picturing gift baskets of yore, complete with seashell soaps and cellophaned wicker baskets, it’s time to update that mental image. Modern gift boxes are painstakingly curated, customized, and packaged for the most intentional gifting moment you can imagine.)
Companies like Giften Market use Zest to streamline the once-arduous task of spreadsheets and recover more than a week’s worth of labor. Other brands like Teak & Twine use self-service Storefronts to eradicate the 20-email back-and-forth that used to exist for every single gift order.
“The scalability of our process makes it easy for companies to send hundreds (or even thousands) of gifts while still maintaining a personalized feel.”
— Torrance Hart, CEO Teak & Twine
While this category may seem like an obvious fit for a gifting platform, most gift box brands are still doing things the old way, e.g., driving gifters toward filling out a contact form. And we get it — it can be tough to find tools that do everything from managing concierge gifts to reducing manual tasks to streamlining a self-service customer experience. Zest is a first-of-its-kind platform that can help brands in this vertical do it all, though, which results in serious scalability and growth.
Is Gifting Right for Your Ecommerce Store?
Wine and beverages, specialty foods, and gift boxes are inherently giftable. Quality wine, an elegant box of chocolates, and a packed gift basket have been go-to presents for decades.
However, without the right tools in their tech stack, even these industries struggled to scale gifting in the world of ecommerce. In the face of confusing checkout flows and friction-filled contact forms, these iconic gifts weren’t able to capitalize on their massive demand.
Zest is the gifting platform finally able to connect the gifts consumers want with the optimized shopping experience they’ve come to expect in the age of ecommerce. In other words, these verticals have finally found the recipe for one wildly successful experiment.
