Ecommerce is a continuously evolving ecosytem.
Tools endlessly update. Best practices shift overnight. Shoppers adopt new consumer trends at the drop of a hat.
For those in the biz, it’s a game of always trying to stay a step ahead of the competition when it comes to seamless checkout flows, next-level personalization, primo email campaigns, smart ad spend, and anything that’ll catch the ever-shifting eye of their audience.
It’s a game of making the entire customer lifecycle better day in and out — and for the brands that invest in the right tech stack and strategies, it’s a game they end up winning time and time again.
But despite this constant quest for the best customer experience on the World Wide Web, there’s still one huge channel where shoppers are demanding improvement while brands keep dragging their feet to deliver: gifting.
Sending gifts online is a pain. And even though the consumer gifting market is surging year over year, most DTC brands have yet to treat gifting as its own serious growth channel. Instead of dedicated infrastructure to meet the needs of modern consumers, brands are forcing shoppers through a friction-filled path to purchase gifts that’s fraught with:
- hard-to-find contact forms
- one tedious transaction per gift
- no gift message or personalization
As a result, the vast majority of brands are leaving bigger cart sizes, higher order values, and a massive customer acquisition opportunity on the table.
In the ecommerce world where change is the only consistency, it’s reality that consumer gifting doesn’t have to be this way. Here’s how Zest is changing the game.
What Is a Consumer Gifting Tool?
Zest’s suite of consumer gifting tools is a first-of-its-kind offering for DTC brands that have been searching for a Shopify-native platform that can tap into the massive DTC gifting market. Launched in 2025, Zest Consumer Gifting finally soothed a pain point being felt by brands already seeing success with Zest Corporate Gifting.
Seemingly every week, our inbox would be stuffed with messages like “Zest helped us scale corporate gifting, but how can it help me scale gifting with my everyday shoppers, too?!”
Our roster of thriving corporate gifting brands was hungry to bring the same features that scaled their B2B channel to the DTC side. They wanted things like:
- The power to send multiple gifts to multiple people in one checkout
- Easy personalization and gift messaging
- Digital gift note and package tracking options
- A path for gift recipients to opt into marketing emails (so brands can identify and engage with them far beyond the gifting moment)
In a nutshell, the most effective consumer gifting tool is one that erases the historic hassles of sending gifts to a handful of friends and family directly in your existing checkout flow. (AKA, consumer gifting should be a process so natural in your checkout that shoppers don’t even really notice it.)
Competitor-crushing consumer gifting is not simply an e-gift card in the product catalog.
It’s not just one email telling your audience to send a single product to a single person as a gift sometime in December.
It’s not a single sentence on a product’s description page labeling it as “A great gift!” while providing no way to actually send a gift.
The tenets of full-bodied consumer gifting infrastructure include the same strategies your best-selling products get all year long. We’re talking benefit-touting landing pages, paid social ads and influencer campaigns, premium packaging (for always-memorable unboxing), occasion-specific email campaigns and promos, and a checkout purpose-built for sending gifts in seconds.
When building out Zest Consumer Gifting, we applied the most potent features of our proven Corporate Gifting product to the consumer gifting flow to deliver the best DTC gifting CX. The result? A lightweight personalized gift message tool called Gift Notes, and a deeply embedded Multiship Checkout that empowers shoppers to send many products to up to 10 lucky recipients in one Shopify checkout.
These products make easy work of the biggest hurdles in consumer gifting today — personalized messaging and one-to-many gifting.
Fixing these consumer gifting trials with dedicated features baked into a brand’s checkout continue to show a big impact on the bottom line, and we have the numbers to prove it.
What We Learned About Consumer Gifting in 2025
When launched in Q3 2025, a handful of intrepid brands, like iconic McCormick & Company, quickly signed onto Zest Consumer Gifting. This gave us a short but mighty Q4 to assess how dedicated consumer gifting infrastructure impacts a brand’s bottom line and overall experience.
What we ended up learning was impressive and underscored the pent-up need for gifting tools that finally fit in the 21st century.
Better tools turn into more gifting.
Once everyday DTC shoppers were given a frictionless and intuitive path to purchase gifts for many people in one checkout, they pounced.
Across brands using Zest Consumer Gifting, multiship revenue grew nearly 53% year over year. Fueling this revenue growth was an 18% increase in the number of customers placing multiship gift orders once given an easier way to do so.
In other words, when brands delivered the opportunity to easily send products to more than one recipient in a transaction, people took advantage (and brands reaped the benefits).
Consumer gifting drives meaningful revenue lift.
With all that extra gifting going on, DTC brands saw more than a 4% overall lift in sitewide revenue.
This lift is a meaningful signal not just in terms of the bottom line, but this was achieved after just one quarter of use and served as a reminder that a change like this can garner fast results. When given the chance to further embed gifting into their overall CX — abiding by the tenets of great consumer gifting with full-on landing pages, ad campaigns, email sequences, and more all year long — the sheer size of this channel’s opportunity starts to come into focus.
Swifter gifting means bigger cart sizes.
When adding another recipient to an order is as simple as a click, gifters respond. With Zest Consumer Gifting on their site, brands saw the number of recipients per multiship order bump up more than 10%. After all, who wouldn’t want to impulsively spread more joy via quick and easy gifting?
Consumer gifting is another inlet to customer awareness and engagement.
With modern gifting tools built seamlessly into the Shopify checkout, more people are sending more gifts, which (naturally) means more people are also receiving more gifts.
This is a li’l effect we dubbed “the gifting flywheel.”
Think of each gift sold as a new customer acquisition opportunity. Every recipient is very likely getting to hold, feel, use, and experience your product for the first time ever. Maybe they’ve heard of your brand before, maybe not, but regardless, your goods are getting into more hands with a built-in endorsement from someone the recipient already trusts, like an employer, a friend, or a family member.
It’s Time Your Consumer Gifting Evolved Alongside the Rest of Ecommerce
The inherent compounding effect of gifting is unique, with few (if any) other growth channels giving brands the same opportunity to scale in such a way.
With Zest on the ecommerce scene, there are no more excuses to continue treating gifting as a nice-to-have channel. The gifting itch your shoppers are currently struggling to scratch — be it consumer, corporate, concierge, and event — finally has the infrastructure that’s been lacking for so long.
Brands that continue ignoring the shifting gifting landscape and forcing shoppers down a complex and time-consuming purchase journey might feel safe today. But the brands adapting to changing consumer needs and investing in dedicated gifting infrastructure are the ones that’ll be leading their categories tomorrow.
