Okuru vs Square Gift Cards vs Shopify Gift Cards
Digital Gift Cards
Opinion Piece
If you've been researching how to sell digital gift cards for your business, you've probably come across Square Gift Cards and Shopify Gift Cards. You may have also found Okuru. They're all in the same general space, but they solve different problems.
Worth being honest about which one fits which kind of business.
Square Gift Cards
If you already use Square as your point of sale system, Square Gift Cards is the easy answer. It integrates with everything you already have, both digital and physical card options, and a buyer can purchase from your own Square Online site.
The catch is the same as it is for any checkout-based tool. The customer has to find your website. They have to know your business exists. Square will process the sale beautifully once the customer is there. It won't bring the customer there.
If you have strong inbound traffic to your website, Square is the right fit. If you don't, the gift card sits behind a door no one is knocking on.
Shopify Gift Cards
If your business runs on Shopify, gift cards are built in. They work alongside the rest of your store, send digitally by email, can be applied at checkout, and integrate with your existing product catalogue.
Same trade-off as Square. The tool is excellent at processing the sale. It assumes you're handling demand generation separately, through ads, SEO, social, email, or whatever else.
If you already drive meaningful traffic to your Shopify site, this is the simplest option you have.
Okuru
Okuru is not a checkout tool. It's a marketplace. The difference matters.
When a customer wants to send a gift card and doesn't yet know which business to pick, they open the Okuru app. They search for cafes near a friend's address. They see your business in the results. They buy. The recipient redeems by showing the card on their phone when they walk in.
You don't need a website. You don't need a checkout. You don't need inbound traffic. The platform itself is the discovery layer.
How to pick
If you already have Square or Shopify with strong website traffic, keep using them for the customers who already find you. Okuru sits alongside, not instead of. It's added reach, specifically for the buyers who weren't going to find your website anyway.
If you don't have a website, or your website doesn't get meaningful traffic, Okuru is the simpler way to enter the digital gift card market. No setup fee, no monthly fee, 7.5% per sale.
Most small businesses we work with use both kinds of tools. They're complementary, not competing.
Apply at okuru.app/for-businesses
