Gift cards sell all year round, and even better during the key moments you choose: your company's anniversary, the back-to-school period, the end of a season, a clearance sale or corporate gift orders. A gift card is easy to give, never the wrong size, and it reassures anyone who has no idea what to choose. Yet many restaurants, beauty salons and local shops in Geneva, Vaud and Valais still sell them only over the counter, on a cardboard voucher torn from a receipt book. Two consequences follow: sales stop when the door closes, even though a large share of these purchases are decided in the evening from the sofa, and nobody knows exactly how many vouchers are still in circulation.
Putting gift cards on sale online rarely takes more than two or three days of work. Here are the realistic technical options for an SME, the accounting and tax treatment in Switzerland, the timeline for a key sales moment, and three fictional worked scenarios in Swiss francs.
A product with immediate cash flow
Gift cards have a feature few products share: you collect the money before delivering the service. A salon that sells 12,000 CHF of vouchers during a key sales moment has that cash straight away, while the treatments will be delivered in the months that follow, often during the quietest periods of the year.
Three further effects come on top of that cash-flow advantage:
- A higher average order. Online, buyers hesitate less to pick 100 CHF instead of 50 CHF, especially when the amounts are offered as preset buttons rather than a free-text field.
- A new customer, paid for by someone else. The recipient is almost never your regular customer. Every voucher sold brings in a person who does not know you yet and who has to walk through your door to use it.
- A share of vouchers never redeemed. Some cards are simply never presented. Be careful, though: that amount remains a liability on the balance sheet and does not turn into profit overnight (see below).
Three technical options, depending on your situation
1. You already have a WordPress site
This is the most common case in French-speaking Switzerland. WooCommerce handles store credit natively, and dedicated extensions (PDF Product Vouchers, YITH Gift Cards) add a branded PDF, scheduled delivery on a chosen date and partial balances. Budget an annual licence of 60 to 120 CHF, plus setup. Cards and Twint run through Stripe or Datatrans, with fees in the region of 2.9% + 0.30 CHF per transaction. This is the cheapest route when the site already exists; if it does not yet, building a business website with a shop in Geneva remains the foundation everything else rests on.
2. You are starting from scratch, or already selling online
Shopify offers gift cards as standard, with no extension: unique code, balance tracked automatically, delivery by email. Plans start around 30 CHF per month. The upside: nothing to maintain, nothing to update. The downside: a subscription for life and less freedom over the design of the voucher.
3. Your till or booking software already does it
Many SMEs are unaware of this. Point-of-sale systems used in hospitality and appointment software used by salons often include a gift-voucher module that can be sold online, with no development at all. Check this option first: it avoids having two stocks of codes to reconcile at the close of the financial year. The critical point is always the same: a voucher sold on the internet must be redeemed in the same till as one sold over the counter.
What must work, whichever option you choose
- A unique code per card, verifiable in ten seconds at the counter, even in the middle of service
- Partial balances: a 100 CHF voucher used for 60 CHF must leave 40 CHF available
- A clean PDF in your brand colours, printable on A4 and readable on a phone
- Scheduled delivery: bought at 11 pm, received the next morning at the chosen time
- Twint: essential in Switzerland, and still missing from too many checkouts
- A dedicated, indexable page with a URL simple enough to dictate over the phone
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Accounting and VAT: what you need to know in Switzerland
This is the point that stalls most projects, and it is simpler than it looks.
VAT. A value voucher, meaning one expressed in francs and usable across your whole offering, is not a supply at the moment it is sold: it is a means of payment. VAT is therefore not due when the voucher is bought, but when it is redeemed, at the rate applicable to the service actually provided. A voucher tied to one specific, clearly identified service may instead be taxed at the point of sale. Have your own case confirmed by your accountant before the first sale.
Bookkeeping. On collection, the amount does not go to the profit and loss account: it is recorded as a liability on the balance sheet, as a debt towards the customer, in an account such as "gift vouchers outstanding". It only becomes revenue when the voucher is redeemed. So keep a record, ideally a monthly export from your shop, with the voucher number, issue date, value, remaining balance and redemption date. That export can be automated: it is exactly the kind of repetitive task better handed to an AI automation workflow than to a spreadsheet maintained by hand.
Validity period. You may set a limit in your terms, but it must remain reasonable, be announced before purchase and appear on the voucher itself. Without any mention, the ordinary ten-year limitation period of the Swiss Code of Obligations applies (art. 127). A six-month validity is poorly received and generates disputes over a few hundred francs: twelve to twenty-four months is a comfortable standard.
Not VAT-registered? Below 100,000 CHF of annual turnover nothing changes: simply state the absence of VAT on the voucher and on the invoice.
The commercial timeline: everything happens in six weeks
- Six to eight weeks before your key moment. Whether it is your company anniversary, the back-to-school period, the end of a season or a clearance sale, the page is live and genuinely tested: a real 5 CHF purchase, PDF received, redeemed at the counter, then refunded. Never test your checkout once the volume has arrived.
- Four weeks before. First communication: an email to your customer base, posts on your social channels, a poster with a QR code in the window and on the tables. If you are targeting corporate gifts, also write to your business customers with an offer for bulk orders.
- The first two weeks of the operation. The bulk of the volume. This is the window where a geotargeted paid campaign on your catchment area pays for itself fastest; our support, quoted on request, covers this kind of commercial sprint.
- The end of the operation. The latecomers. One message to hammer home: "delivered by email in two minutes, print it or give it straight from your phone". That is your decisive argument against a physical shop.
- The following three months. Follow up with recipients. A friendly reminder at sixty days lifts the redemption rate, and a redeemed voucher is a customer who comes back, not just a liability cleared.
Three worked scenarios
These three scenarios are fictional examples: they illustrate orders of magnitude, not the results of real businesses.
A 40-cover restaurant in Geneva
Vouchers at 50, 100 and 200 CHF, plus a "tasting menu for two" at 180 CHF. Over the restaurant's anniversary month: 90 vouchers sold, average value 105 CHF, so 9,450 CHF collected and roughly 300 CHF in payment fees. Over the following four months, 78 vouchers are presented, with a bill that often exceeds the voucher value by 20 to 30 CHF (drinks, dessert). Above all, the operation fills weekday evenings in the low season, usually the emptiest.
A beauty salon in Lausanne
Only three amounts: 80, 150 and 250 CHF, plus two treatment packages. 12,400 CHF collected during a back-to-school operation, most of it redeemed in the following three months. The real value is not that figure but the appointment book for the quiet weeks that follow, filled in advance by people who, for the most part, are discovering the salon. A third of them come back later as paying customers.
A local shop in the canton of Vaud
A homeware boutique, vouchers from 30 to 150 CHF sold during its end-of-season clearance, instant email delivery. 4,800 CHF over six weeks, for total technical costs of 180 CHF in the first year. The real gain lies elsewhere: the shop captures Sunday and evening sales, when the shutters are down. People still need to know the voucher exists, which is why social media management matters throughout the period.
Five mistakes that cost real money
- Launching the page once the operation has started. A payment bug discovered mid-operation means the operation is lost.
- Forgetting Twint. In Switzerland, a checkout without Twint loses a share of buyers, especially younger ones.
- Not handling partial balances. A 100 CHF voucher "consumed" on a 62 CHF purchase creates an unhappy customer and a damaged reputation.
- Booking the sale as revenue. It is a liability until the voucher is redeemed, and an audit will pick it up.
- Communicating nothing. An invisible gift-card page sells nothing. It belongs in the main menu, in your email signature, on your online listings and on a QR code in the window.
Where to start
Start by checking whether your till or booking software already sells vouchers online. If it does, switch the module on and test it. If it does not, budget two to three days of work for a WooCommerce or Shopify shop, between 200 and 800 CHF of technical costs in the first year, and one well-crafted dedicated page. The point is not to sell vouchers for their own sake: it is to collect your quiet months' revenue during your key sales moments, and to bring in people who would never have walked through your door otherwise.