Gift Cards
Atlantic Zeiser's NEW high-performance and highly versatile card personalization platform delivers the right innovation, reliability and flexibility. We are helping our customers to reduce their costs while taking the gift card market to new level.
Gift cards are a specific category of prepaid payment cards that incorporate a back-end account loaded with a designated amount of money. Sold primarily through retail and restaurant channels, they can be given as a gift to others and used as cash for future purchases. Businesses can set pre-determined values or allow consumers to select the amount of their choice.
These plastic cards don’t carry the cardholder's name, just a merchant managed account number that the gift card is linked to. The account number is either encoded on the card’s magnetic stripe and/or printed as a bar code.
The market for gift cards is booming, especially in the US, where the sales volume has increased from around 55 Bn. dollars in 2004 to about 80 Bn. dollars in 2007. Gift cards have also gained significant momentum in Europe and other regions.
In the past, gift cards were standard shaped CR80 cards. Due to rapid market growth, differentiation is now a must. Gift cards have a visual appeal factor and require high-resolution, personalized printing to ensure an attractive end result.
There are technical and practical challenges to personalization. An increasing number of cards are of varying sizes or odd shape. Smaller merchants are offering gift cards, leading to ever smaller job runs. How to produce a quality gift card, regardless of size or run length, while profiting?
