Gift Card Not Received by Recipient

Diagnose and fix the 5 most common reasons a Giftnote gift card never reached the recipient, from product setup to Klaviyo flows.

Written By Giftnote Team

Last updated About 4 hours ago

A customer bought a gift card for someone and the recipient never got it — we know how stressful that is, especially during gifting season. This is almost always caused by one of five things, and most of them you can diagnose and fix yourself in under five minutes.

Most common causes

  1. Gift card product is misconfigured — the Vendor field, inventory, or shipping settings aren't set correctly, which silently prevents delivery.

  2. Gift card went to the purchaser, not the recipient — the customer added the gift card to their cart from the product page without filling in recipient details.

  3. Klaviyo flows are disconnected — especially common after reinstalling the Giftnote app, which can break the link to your Klaviyo flows.

  4. Recipient email address is invalid — a typo or hidden whitespace character in the email field causes silent delivery failure.

  5. Native emails and Klaviyo are both off — Giftnote's built-in emails were disabled for Klaviyo, but Klaviyo flows were never activated (or were deactivated).

Fix each cause

Check your gift card product configuration

This is the single most common reason gift cards fail to deliver. Giftnote identifies your gift card product by specific settings — if any of them are wrong, the gift card code may never reach the recipient.

  1. Open your Shopify admin and go to Products Find the product you're using as your Giftnote gift card.

  2. Check the Vendor field Scroll to the Organization section on the product page. The Vendor field must be set to exactly Giftnote (capital G, one word).

If the Vendor field is blank, set to your store name, or contains a typo, gift card delivery will silently fail. Update it to Giftnote and click Save.

  1. Confirm the product is not set as a physical product In the Shipping section, make sure This is a physical product is unchecked. If it's checked, customers will be charged shipping for a digital gift card.

If you don't see a Shipping section, check each individual variant — shipping settings can be set at the variant level.

  1. Confirm inventory tracking is turned off In the Inventory section (or on each variant), make sure Track quantity is unchecked. Enabling inventory tracking on a gift card product causes gift card codes to become invalid.

  2. Verify the product template is set to gift-card At the bottom of the product page in the Online store section, check that the Theme template is set to gift-card. This is required for Giftnote's delivery mechanism to activate.

If you don't see a gift-card template option, your theme may need one created. Contact support and we'll help.

  1. Confirm the product was created from scratch Giftnote gift card products must be created as a brand new Shopify product — not converted from an existing product or duplicated from a native Shopify gift card. If you're unsure how this product was originally created and nothing else is fixing the issue, you may need to create a new one.

  2. Check that only one Giftnote gift card product is live If you have multiple gift card products published in your store, archive all but one. Having multiple live gift card products with the Vendor set to "Giftnote" can cause routing issues.

How you'll know it's fixed: After correcting any of the above settings and clicking Save, place a test gift card order from your live storefront (not from the Shopify admin). The recipient should receive the gift card email within a few minutes.

Check whether the gift card went to the purchaser instead of the recipient

This happens when a customer adds the gift card product to their cart directly from the product page — without filling in a recipient name, email, or gift message through the Giftnote gift message widget. Without recipient details, Giftnote has nowhere to send the gift card, so Shopify's default behaviour kicks in and the code goes to the buyer.

  1. Open the order in your Shopify admin Go to Orders and find the gift card order in question.

  2. Look for Giftnote order attributes In the order details, check for fields like giftnote_to, giftnote_email, and giftnote_message in the Additional details section.

If these fields are missing, the customer bypassed the gift flow entirely. The gift card code was sent to the purchaser's email instead.

  1. To fix this for the affected customer: Contact Giftnote support with the order number. We can manually re-issue the gift card and send it directly to the intended recipient.

  2. To prevent this going forward: Make sure the gift message widget is placed on your gift card product page — not the checkout widget. The checkout widget does not work for gift card purchases. Only the product page widget triggers the correct gift card flow.

Also consider removing the standard Add to Cart button from your gift card product page template so customers must go through the Giftnote widget to purchase.

Check whether your Klaviyo flows are active

If you're using Klaviyo to deliver gift card emails (recommended), the Klaviyo flows must be active and connected. Reinstalling the Giftnote app can disconnect legacy Klaviyo flows without warning.

  1. Log in to your Klaviyo account

  2. Go to Flows and search for your Giftnote flows Look for flows with names like "Gift Card Delivered" or "Gift Card Purchased."

  3. Check that each flow's status is Live If a flow shows as Draft or Manual, it is not sending automatically.

If your flows show as Draft after a recent app reinstall, they may need to be replaced entirely. Old Giftnote event triggers cannot be patched — contact support and we'll copy the current template flows into your account.

  1. Verify that Giftnote's native emails are disabled In your Giftnote app, go to Settings → Notifications and confirm that the built-in email templates are toggled off. If both Klaviyo flows and native Giftnote emails are active, recipients can receive duplicate emails. If both are off, recipients receive nothing.

How you'll know it's fixed: Your Klaviyo flows will show as Live, and the flow analytics will show new events being received after the next gift card purchase.

Check the recipient's email address

A typo or hidden whitespace character in the recipient email field will cause delivery to fail silently — the gift card will show as "sent" in your Giftnote dashboard, but the email never arrives.

  1. Open your Giftnote dashboard and find the gift card order Check the recipient email address listed for that order.

  2. Look for obvious issues Common problems: misspelled domain (gmial.com instead of gmail.com), extra space before or after the email, missing characters.

[ A whitespace trim fix was deployed, but custom form integrations or older widget versions may still pass through leading/trailing spaces.

  1. Ask the purchaser to confirm the intended email address If the email on file doesn't match what the purchaser intended, contact Giftnote support with the correct email. We can manually re-issue the gift card to the right address.

Check for a delivery gap between native emails and Klaviyo

This happens when Giftnote's built-in email templates were turned off in preparation for Klaviyo — but the Klaviyo flows were never activated, or the Klaviyo transactional approval is still pending.

  1. In the Giftnote app, go to Settings → Notifications Check whether the native email templates are toggled on or off.

  2. If native emails are off, verify Klaviyo flows are Live Follow the steps in the Klaviyo section above. If your Klaviyo flows are still in Draft or waiting for transactional approval, either activate them or temporarily re-enable Giftnote's native emails so gift cards are delivered while you wait.

Klaviyo transactional approval typically takes up to 24 hours. If you're about to go live or are in a peak gifting period, enable native emails as a safety net until approval comes through.

Still not working?

If none of the above resolved it, try these:

  1. Check your Shopify billing spend cap. If your store has hit the $999 default monthly app billing limit, Giftnote may have stopped processing. Go to Shopify Admin → Settings → Billing → View all subscriptions → Giftnote → View spending limit and increase the cap.

  2. Check whether the gift card product uses a native Shopify gift card type. Giftnote gift cards must be standard Shopify products — not Shopify's built-in gift card product type. If the product was created using Shopify's native "Gift card" option, it's incompatible with Giftnote and needs to be recreated from scratch as a regular product.

  3. Ask the recipient to check their spam/junk folder. Gift card delivery emails can occasionally be filtered, especially if the recipient's email provider is unfamiliar with your sending domain.

Contact Giftnote support — include your store URL, the Shopify order number for the affected gift card, and the recipient email address so we can investigate and re-issue immediately.

Related articles