How Do E-gifts Work?

E-gifting is one of Zest's flagship features. It lets your customers send a specific physical product as a gift without needing to know the recipient's shipping address in advance. You set up the entire experience yourself, right from your Zest partner dashboard.

Before you begin:

An e-gift is a way to send a physical product to recipients digitally. The gifter selects a specific product — not a dollar amount or store credit — and sends a notification via email, SMS, or a shareable link to the recipient.

The recipient opens a personalized or branded digital card with the gift message, then accepts the gift by entering their own shipping address and preferred delivery date. Once accepted, the order is created and the physical product ships directly to them.

E-gifts are not gift cards. The gifter selects an actual item (for example, cookies or a sweatshirt), and that specific product is what the recipient receives. Unlike gift cards, e-gifts don't create long-term balance sheet liabilities and see significantly higher redemption rates — e-gifts outsell digital gift cards approximately 50:1 when both options are available on the same storefront.

E-gifts are especially useful when:

When a gifter places an e-gift order, they choose one of three delivery methods:

Email: Zest sends a branded email directly to the recipient's email address from your brand's domain. The email includes the gift message and a link to accept the gift.

SMS: Zest sends a text message to the recipient's phone number with a link to accept.

Link: Zest generates a unique, shareable URL. No email or SMS is sent by Zest — the gifter copies the link and distributes it themselves (via mail merge, direct message, or any other channel). When link delivery is selected, Zest cannot send automated reminders, which makes following up on unaccepted gifts more difficult. Some brands choose to remove the link option for this reason.

When a recipient opens their gift notification, they see a branded digital card with the gifter's message. From there, the recipient:

Once accepted, the Child Order is created and pushed to Shopify.

If you enable gift swapping in your Zest settings, recipients can exchange the gifted product for an alternative within 10% of the original product's price (lower, not higher).

The price comparison includes both the product price and shipping. This is useful for dietary preferences (for example, swapping to a vegan option) or size and color selection.

If a recipient needs assistance, you or the gifter can use the e-gift acceptance link to complete the acceptance process on their behalf by entering the recipient's shipping address directly.

Gifters are charged at the time of purchase. Payment is processed via Stripe and covers the full order amount — including estimated shipping for all recipients — before any recipient accepts. For multi-recipient orders, there is one single charge for the entire order.

Shopify orders are not created until each recipient accepts their gift. As recipients accept individually, a Child Order is created and pushed to Shopify with the recipient's shipping information. Unaccepted e-gifts do not appear in Shopify and will not flow to your warehouse or fulfillment systems.

Important for reporting: This timing creates a revenue reconciliation difference between Stripe and Shopify. If a gift order is placed in December but a recipient accepts in January, Stripe records the revenue in December while Shopify records it in January. Use Zest reporting to reconcile these differences.

Approximately 85% of e-gifts are accepted within the first 48 hours. Acceptance rates tend to be lower when e-gifts are sent as cold outbound prospecting tools rather than to known recipients, so keep that in mind if this is your primary use of e-gifts.

Automated reminder emails

Zest automatically sends reminder notifications to recipients who haven't accepted their e-gift:

No additional reminders are sent after day 7 in order to protect email reputation and avoid spam issues.

Gifters also receive summary emails at day 1 and day 7 showing how many of their recipients have accepted.

Monitor all pending, or unaccepted, e-gifts in the Unaccepted E-gifts report in your Zest partner dashboard.

You can also go to any e-gift order form your Orders page. From here, you can:

E-gifts that have been accepted will display an external Shopify order number.

Unlike gift cards, e-gifts are tied to specific products (SKUs), so they don't create indefinite balance sheet liabilities.

You can configure automatic refund rules in your Zest seller settings. When enabled, Zest automatically cancels and refunds unaccepted e-gifts after your configured delay period.

No default delay is set. You must configure the delay period in your seller settings before auto-refunds will process.

At any time, you can manually process a refund for an unaccepted e-gift directly from the order in your Zest partner dashboard.

If a product goes out of stock or is discontinued before a recipient accepts, you can proactively swap the product in the Zest order management interface. The Outstanding Inventory of Unaccepted E-Gifts report helps you monitor pending quantities per SKU. Including up-to-date availability notes in your product descriptions is recommended.

Direct ship and e-gift recipients cannot be combined in a single order. If a gifter needs to send to both address-known and address-unknown recipients, they will need to create two separate orders — one for direct ship and one for e-gift.

Note: E-gift orders require a shipping profile with an e-gift shipping zone configured in Zest. Because the recipient's address is unknown at checkout, a dedicated e-gift shipping zone must be set up for all e-gift-eligible products.

Because e-gift notifications are delivered instantly via email or SMS, you can keep selling after your physical shipping cutoff date. The digital notification arrives before the holiday, while the physical product ships after the recipient accepts and provides their address.

For example, if your shipping cutoff is December 16, you can continue offering e-gifts through December 25. Recipients receive their notification immediately and can accept at their convenience. You can even disable the direct-ship option on a storefront after your cutoff date and offer only e-gifts, so customers can still purchase right up to and through a holiday or event.

By default, Zest does not decrement Shopify inventory when a gift order is placed. Inventory is decremented in Shopify only when the Child Order is pushed. In other words, inventory is decremented only when the recipient accepts their gift.

This means:

To manage this proactively, use the Outstanding Inventory report in your Zest partner dashboard. This report shows total pending quantity per SKU across all unaccepted e-gifts so you can manually manage stock levels.

If you want Shopify inventory to decrement when Child Orders are pushed (even if Shopify's inventory policy would otherwise block the order), contact Zest to enable inventory tracking.

Recipient-side email filters — especially corporate and bank email systems — can block e-gift notifications. To work around this:

Zest cannot automatically detect bounced or misdelivered emails — an incorrect address might still reach someone else's inbox. To correct:

Direct ship and e-gift recipients cannot be mixed in a single order. Create two separate orders — one with physical addresses for direct ship, one with email addresses for e-gift.

E-gifts only require an email address or phone number at purchase, so an international recipient can receive the notification. However, they will be blocked from completing the acceptance process if your shipping profile does not allow international delivery. Review your shipping settings before sending e-gifts to international recipients.

If you switch Shopify stores or ecommerce platforms, unaccepted e-gifts from the old connection will no longer work. Before migrating: