Using gift cards as customer or employee rewards sounds great until you need to send hundreds or thousands of them at once. Suddenly, you're juggling multiple vendor contracts, wrestling with international currencies, and manually tracking redemptions for tax purposes.
There's a better way.
Gift card aggregators consolidate your entire rewards operation into a single platform, giving you access to thousands of digital gift cards without the operational headaches. The right aggregator can transform a logistical nightmare into a streamlined, automated process.
Find out what gift card aggregators are, why traditional approaches tend to fall apart at scale, and what features you should prioritize when choosing a platform for your business.
What is a gift card aggregator?
A gift card aggregator is a platform that connects businesses to a wide catalog of digital gift cards through a single portal.
Do you know those grocery store endcaps that offer gift cards for retailers like Starbucks, Papa John's, and Amazon? A gift card aggregator is that, but digital, and it's for businesses rather than consumers.
Unlike endcaps that let people buy one or two cards at a time, aggregators are designed for B2B use cases. They help companies send hundreds or thousands of rewards and incentives at scale. Log into one gift card aggregator, and you can instantly access a large catalog of digital reward options.
Why traditional gift card management struggles to scale
Managing gift cards in-house or through single-brand vendors can work at small volumes. But as soon as your incentive program or company grows, this model collapses.
Here’s where businesses run into trouble:
Operational bottlenecks: Juggling multiple vendors, payout schedules, and ordering systems is inefficient. It raises the risk of fulfillment errors, frustrating your team and the gift card recipients.
Tax compliance headaches: Rewards are usually taxable, which complicates gift card management. Tracking gift card transactions across multiple issuers can take a ton of time.
Challenges with delivering gift cards internationally: Each country has its own rules for digital gift cards, as well as local currencies, languages, and brands. This makes global employee incentive or customer rewards programs difficult to manage by hand.
These challenges can make scaling any incentive program unsustainable unless you have the right technology, which is where gift card aggregators can help out.
Aggregators provide an easy way for brands to deliver compliance-friendly rewards across borders instantly.
Overview of the gift card aggregator landscape
Gift card aggregators come in different forms, each with trade-offs and fees:
Basic catalogs: Provide access to a small set of brands, usually with flat per-card fees. Catalogs offer a simple entry point, but they have limited functionality.
Full-service platforms: Offer a broad digital gift card catalog plus features like tracking, reporting, and bulk sending. Costs sometimes include things like platform fees and delivery charges, but some are free to use.
API-first solutions: Gift card APIs are built for developers to integrate gift card delivery directly into apps or workflows. Many full-service platforms also offer APIs.
An aggregator can help lower the costs of sending gift cards at scale (and the hidden costs of sending them incorrectly), making large-scale incentive programs and mass payouts more sustainable.
7 things to look for in a gift card aggregator platform
Choosing the right digital gift card catalog is like picking a business partner. You want a solution that makes life easier for your team and recipients.
Focus on seven top features:
1. Clear pricing
A good aggregator will list every fee upfront — not hit you with hidden delivery or international transaction fees later. Check the pricing page and read the fine print. If you have questions, contact a team member to clarify.
2. A wide catalog of digital gift cards
Gift card recipients love having choice. No two people want the same reward, and a digital gift card catalog should reflect that.
Look for solutions with thousands of options across retail, food, travel, entertainment, and digital services, as well as prepaid cards.
A wider catalog makes it easier to give recipients something they’ll want.
3. Cross-border support
With many companies hiring globally and serving customers worldwide, global coverage is key.
You want a platform that can handle local languages and currencies, and offer gift cards to popular regional brands.
This keeps your program consistent without making your team work harder to treat global employees and customers fairly.
4. Easy connection to your existing systems
Look for a digital gift card catalog that integrates with your existing tools, or that offers an API. This way, sending a gift card can be integrated into your existing workflows, making incentives and rewards as easy as possible.
5. Reliable security
Gift cards carry real monetary value , so security is essential. Trustworthy aggregators protect data with standards like encryption and SOC 2 compliance.
6. Easy-to-understand reporting
Avoid choosing a tool that ignores reporting. You shouldn’t have to dig through spreadsheets to understand the status of each gift card delivered through your program. The right platform gives you clear dashboards and reports to see standard metrics:
Who received what rewards
Which rewards were redeemed
How much you’ve spent
This information is crucial for compliance and budget purposes, and it helps you prepare for any hiccups on the recipient’s end.
7. Reliable customer support
Even with the best systems, people lose things. Emails with gift card codes go to spam. Text messages with reward info get deleted. Sometimes, information gets lost in translation.
Invest in an aggregator with a reliable, knowledgeable customer support team to keep everything running smoothly for you and your recipients.
How Tremendous simplifies gift card delivery
Tremendous makes it easy for businesses to deliver rewards quickly and at scale:
Free to use: Tremendous doesn't charge platform fees.
Global catalog: Over 2,000 reward options across 230+ countries, which is ideal for domestic and global teams. Everyone gets what they want.
Automated sending and integrations: Send rewards via API, bulk upload, or connect directly to your existing tools.
Security and compliance: Tremendous is a secure platform and maintains SOC 2 Type II compliance. You also get access to fraud prevention and tax compliance features.
Easy, global delivery: Send rewards instantly via text message or email, or order physical cards for delivery. For international rewards, the platform handles local currency conversion and language translation.
Clear reporting: The dashboard tracks your spend along with metrics like reward redemptions, making account reconciliation easy.
Ready to see how Tremendous can help you send gift cards at scale? Schedule a demo with our team today.
Key takeaways
Gift cards are becoming more popular, with a net increase of 42% in North America and 37% in Europe for gift card spending in incentive programs in 2024. Aggregators can help you level up your gift card game with these three key points:
What aggregators do: A gift card aggregator is a single, API-powered portal to a wide digital gift card catalog. It allows brands to automate sending at scale without wrangling multiple vendors.
Why it matters: Managing cards manually (or via single-brand vendors) doesn’t scale well. It can introduce risks, like operational bottlenecks, tax and compliance issues, and failed sends. An aggregator helps you avoid these problems.
How to choose: Prioritize clear pricing, a broad global catalog, easy integration, strong security, useful reporting, and responsive support.
