Beyond their traditional role as a gift, gift cards are frequently used by retailers as a promotional incentive — offering a bonus card with a qualifying purchase to encourage both the original sale and a future return visit. These promotions can genuinely add value, but they come with conditions that are easy to overlook in the moment.
A typical promotion might offer a bonus gift card of a set value when spending above a certain threshold. From the retailer's perspective, this achieves two goals at once: it increases the average order size to hit the spending threshold, and it guarantees a future visit when the customer returns to redeem the bonus card, often leading to additional spending beyond the card's value.
None of these conditions make a bonus gift card promotion a bad deal, but they do mean the advertised value isn't always as straightforward as it first appears.
Gift cards, promotional or otherwise, lose their value if they're forgotten in a drawer or expire unused. Setting a reminder tied to the card's expiration date, checking the balance before shopping, and treating a bonus card as a specific line item in a future purchase — rather than vague future credit — all help ensure the promotional value is actually captured rather than lost to time.