Buying stuff online is getting easier by the day.
One-click checkout. Bottomless payment options. Free 2-day shipping.
It’s like the moment you even think of buying something online, it can go from in your cart to on your doorstep within the day.
(For any of us who were wheeling and dealing online during the early aughts, the speed and access of modern ecommerce was truly unimaginable while we waited 3 weeks for goods to mosey onto our doorstep.)
But while you’re basking in the glow of fully optimized shopping journeys today, there’s one flow that’s been notoriously unpleasant: online gifting.
Zest is on a mission to fix gifting and make sending online gifts as swift and simple as buying for yourself. With features like Gift Notes and Multiship Checkout, your consumers can now load up their carts and get to gifting without leaving your gold-standard Shopify checkout.
It’s the best way to turn anything your shoppers buy into the perfect online gift.
Unwrapping The Hidden Friction of Online Gifts
Buying a gift online has always felt like a consolation prize compared with shopping for yourself. While retailers have been perfecting the self-purchase journey since ecommerce was invented, gifting has remained stuck in the digital stone age.
The typical online gifting experience involves awkward workarounds, multiple checkout sessions, and enough friction to make even the most well-intentioned gift-giver think twice. And in an age where consumer gifting is on-the-rise, friction is easily Enemy #1.
Consider the mental gymnastics your customers are forced to perform when they want to send a gift from your online store. They add items to their cart, realize they need different shipping addresses, panic about whether they can add a personal message, abandon their cart to figure out logistics, and often end up buying generic gift cards instead of the thoughtful presents they originally set out to send.
This isn't just frustrating for your customers—it's costing your business real revenue. When gifting is complicated, shoppers default to easier alternatives (including your gift-savvy competitors) or simply abandon their high-value carts full of gifts.
No matter how much they love your products and want to get them into the hands of friends and family, even a little friction is enough to make them throw their hands up and say, “Forget it.”
Why Traditional Gifting Solutions Don’t Cut It
Most existing gifting solutions treat gift-giving as an afterthought rather than a core experience. They bolt on basic functionality that feels disconnected from your brand experience, forcing customers to navigate clunky or outdated interfaces that break the flow they've come to expect from modern ecommerce and your brand.
The way gifting has always been done often requires customers to do too much heavy lifting. In some instances, shoppers have to navigate away from the checkout fill out a simple gift message. In others, they have to handle the logistics of the gift note all on their own with nothing but a hope and a prayer that their heartfelt card arrives roughly around the same time as the present.
Put the customer’s plight aside for a minute and let’s look at what brands have had to suffer if they wanted to offer a gifting experience on their site. Brands had to:
- Pick a platform from just a few gifting apps on the market. They’re inexpensive enough, but with a fee of $1 per gift message sent, peak gifting season can easily rack up monthly platform fees in the tens of thousands.
- Accept the fact that the app they chose doesn’t look or feel like their carefully curated CX. (And no, there’s not any room for customizing colors, copy, or anything else.)
- Settle with the notion that even though they’re using a gifting tool in the 21st century, there’s no way to see who’s receiving a gift or way to engage and nurture that recipient.
- Simply shrug when they realized that a multiship checkout that would empower shoppers to send gifts to more than one person in a single checkout simply didn’t exist.
In a nutshell, the gifting solutions of yore have forced gifters to trudge through a friction-filled mess and retailers to endure off-brand add-ons.
The result? A gifting experience that feels transactional rather than personal, complicated rather than convenient, and frustrating rather than delightful. And for your bottom line? It's an untold number of potential gift purchases that never made it past the cart abandonment stage.
Zest Gift Notes Turns Any Transaction into a Personal Present
Gift Notes transforms any purchase into a meaningful gift by seamlessly integrating personalized messaging directly into your checkout flow.
Instead of treating gift messages as an afterthought or a disjointed experience, this feature makes them a natural part of the purchase process, encouraging customers to add that personal touch that turns a simple transaction into a heartfelt gesture, or (better yet) the feature inspires shoppers who were there for themselves to up the ante and send some gifts.
The beauty of Gift Notes lies in its simplicity. Customers can add personalized messages without leaving your checkout page or navigating to separate forms. The feature integrates naturally with your existing Shopify checkout, maintaining the smooth, familiar experience your customers expect while on your site.
This seemingly simple addition has big-time psychological effects. When customers can easily add a personal message, they're more likely to view their purchase as a gift rather than just another online transaction. This shift in mindset often leads to increased order values and loyalty as gifters typically spend more when they're explicitly purchasing presents for others.
Gift Notes also creates opportunities for brands to collect valuable gifter and recipient data, like names, emails, and phone numbers.
When someone sends a Zest-powered gift, the recipient can opt into a brand’s marketing when they open the gift and accept tracking details. This is the first time that brands finally have a way to gain insight into not just who is buying gifts but who is receiving them.
This information not only becomes invaluable for future marketing campaigns and acquisition strategies, but it’s a wide open doorway to an audience hankering to hear from the brand they were gifted.
Zest Multiship Checkout: One Cart, Multiple Recipients
Multiship Checkout revolutionizes the gifting experience by allowing customers to purchase multiple items and send them to different addresses in a single transaction.
This eliminates one of the biggest pain points in online gifting: the need to complete multiple separate purchases when buying for several recipients.
Imagine a customer preparing for the holiday season who wants to send gifts to family members across the country. Before Zest (or BZ, as we like to call it), eager gifters would need to complete separate transactions for each recipient, refilling their cart, re-entering payment information and billing addresses, and dealing with multiple transactions.
Multiship Checkout consolidates this entire process into one streamlined experience. It’s the first and only multi-recipient checkout solution built for Shopify Checkout.
Instead of viewing group gifting as a complex logistics nightmare, customers can approach it with the same ease they experience when buying for themselves.
And just like with Zest Gift Notes, every recipient can opt into your store’s marketing, meaning every gift order going to multiple recipients could connect your brand to two, three, or even 10 potential new customers.
Seamless Integration with Your Brand Experience
Both Gift Notes and Multiship Checkout are designed to feel like natural extensions of your existing Shopify store rather than third-party add-ons. They maintain your brand's visual vibes and user experience standards while adding the much-needed functionality that enhances rather than disrupts the customer journey.
This seamless integration is key to maintaining customer trust and brand consistency. When gifting features feel native to your store, to the brand they know and love already, customers are more likely to use them confidently. They don't have to worry about whether they're being redirected to secure pages or whether their payment information is safe—everything happens within the familiar environment of your branded checkout.
The integration also extends to your backend operations, adding clarity to this channel that you didn’t have before. Gift orders appear in your ecommerce backend and aren’t muddied with the rest of your orders, so you no longer have to play the guessing game “Gift or Not Gift.”
Streamlined Gifting and a Boon to Your Bottom Line
Adding comprehensive gifting solutions like Gift Notes and Multiship Checkout to your tech stack opens up this lucrative channel for your company. No more bottlenecks or unclear data, no more guessing if shoppers are buying gifts (and what those gifts are), no more wondering who’s receiving your products and how to reach them. Just purely modern online gifting.
Gifters typically have higher average order values than your regular shoppers, as they're less price-sensitive when purchasing for others. They're also more likely to add premium options like expedited shipping, custom add-ons, or gift wrapping when the process feels effortless.
Beyond immediate revenue impacts, top-tier gifting experiences create powerful word-of-mouth marketing opportunities. And remember, recipients of your online gifts often become customers themselves, creating natural customer acquisition loops. When someone receives a beautifully presented gift with a personal message, they associate that positive experience with your brand—and then they want to recreate that experience for others.
Streamlined gifting also opens up new seasonal marketing opportunities. Instead of limiting gift campaigns to traditional holidays, brands can capitalize on personal occasions like birthdays, anniversaries, and life milestones when customers can easily send personalized gifts to multiple recipients. Better online gifting turns gifting from a Q4-only initiative to a year-long money-maker.
The Future of Ecommerce Is Gift-First
As online shopping continues to evolve, the brands that thrive will be those that recognize gifting not as a nice-to-have feature, but as a core part of modern ecommerce—just like one-click checkouts or BNPL plans.
Zest Gift Notes and Multiship Checkout represent the next evolution in online retail that make every purchase an opportunity to strengthen relationships and create meaningful connections. In other words, any purchase can become a much more powerful present when the best gifting CX is placed right in front of your shoppers.
By removing friction from the gifting process, these features don't just improve customer experience, but they unlock entirely new revenue streams and customer acquisition channels. They transform your ecommerce store from a place where people simply buy things for themselves into a platform that facilitates human connection and generosity.
The question isn't whether your customers want better gifting options. It's whether you're ready to give them the tools they need to turn every purchase into an opportunity for joy.
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