Shopify Gift Cards, Explained: The 2,000 Dollar Limit Nobody Reads

Shopify gift cards come in two forms: a gift card product customers buy, with fixed denominations up to 10,000 dollars, and a card you create in the admin for any eligible value up to 2,000 dollars. Gift cards combine with discount codes, several can be used on one order, and a gift card cannot buy another gift card. The admin only shows the last four characters of a code, because gift cards are treated like money.

Gift cards look like the simplest product in a Shopify store. They are not. They are a liability, a currency, and a fraud vector wearing a product listing, and the merchants who get burned by them are usually the ones who set them up in an afternoon and never read the limits page.

Shopify's own Help Center is blunt about the shape of the thing. You can activate gift cards to sell gift card products and create gift cards directly from your admin at no cost to the recipient. That sentence hides two different mechanisms with different limits, different tax treatment, and different fraud risk. The rest of this post is the difference between them, and the limits that catch people.

Two ways to make a card, with two different caps

Sell them, or create them yourself. A gift card product is a product customers buy in your store, and the card is created when you fulfill the order with that product, by default automatically once the order is paid. A card created in the admin is a card of any eligible value, made without anyone paying, which suits promotions, rewards, refunds as store credit, or a custom amount a customer paid for beforehand through a draft order.

The caps are different and they matter. A gift card product has preset values known as denominations, and a customer cannot input a custom amount from your storefront. The maximum per denomination is 10,000 dollars or the equivalent in the card's currency, and it cannot be raised. A card created in the admin can be worth up to 2,000 dollars or the equivalent. Shopify Support can raise or lower that limit after a review. If you need a 5,000 dollar card for a corporate client, you sell it as a product denomination. You do not create it in the admin and wonder why the field stops at 2,000.

What a gift card cannot do

A gift card can be redeemed only at the store that issued it. Gift cards cannot be redeemed across different Shopify stores, and there is no native way to move or transfer gift cards between stores. A gift card cannot buy another gift card. The value of a gift card and the redemption code cannot be customized from your theme, and the compare-at price field should not be used to discount gift cards. Use discount codes or automatic discounts to reduce the price of gift card products instead.

Collection discounts do not apply to gift card products in that collection. Discounts must target the product or variant directly, which is the kind of detail that costs a merchant a support ticket on the first sale of the season. Gift cards can be combined with discount codes, and several cards can be used on one order. They can cover an initial subscription payment but not recurring subscription charges. And for stores created on or after May 12, 2025, orders that include gift cards as a payment method are charged third-party transaction fees on the order amount paid using a gift card. That fee is easy to miss in the margin math, and it is real.

Expiry, currency, and the liability you are carrying

By default gift cards do not expire, because that is illegal in some countries. If you set an expiry, the default is five years, adjustable in years, months, or days under Settings, then Payments. Gift cards create a liability to provide future sales, and depending on your region's laws you might not be allowed to add an expiry date or to limit the way the gift card is used. Those cards are included in your gift cards finance reports, which is where the liability sits on the books until it is redeemed or expires.

Currency is the other trap. Local currency gift cards can be redeemed only when the checkout currency matches the gift card currency, unless you turn on cross-currency redemption, which lets the card be applied at checkout in other currencies. If you turn it on, exchange rate changes between when the card is sold and when it is redeemed can affect the value you receive, a risk Shopify calls exchange rate drift. You cannot change the cross-currency setting after the gift card is created. And the code itself: gift cards are considered currency, so only the customer or recipient can access the full code. You can view only the last four characters. If a customer loses the code, you cannot read it back to them, which is worth telling them before they lose it.

Frequently asked questions

What is the maximum value of a Shopify gift card?

A gift card product denomination caps at 10,000 dollars or the equivalent, and it cannot be raised. A card created directly in the admin caps at 2,000 dollars, though Shopify Support can raise or lower that limit after a review.

Can a customer use a gift card to buy another gift card?

No. A gift card cannot buy another gift card. Gift cards can be combined with discount codes, and several cards can be used on one order, but they cannot be spent on gift card products themselves.

Do Shopify gift cards expire?

By default they do not expire, because expiry is illegal in some countries. If you set an expiry, the default is five years, adjustable under Settings, then Payments. Some regions prohibit expiry dates entirely, so check your local rules.

Can I see a customer's full gift card code?

No. Gift cards are treated like money, so the admin only shows the last four characters of the code. Only the customer or recipient can access the full code, which is why losing it is a real problem.