Designing your own Shopify gift cards: from code to folding card

A Shopify gift card is a code in an email. It works, but it does not look like much, and a gift card is meant to be given. Anyone who wants to hand it over, print it or put it in an envelope needs a card that matches the shop.

This guide walks from code to designed folding card using KYTH.Kartuu, our Shopify app for gift cards: set up your appearance, pick a template, design freely in the editor, publish the gift card. It follows the English interface as it looked on 20 September 2026.

What a Shopify gift card does by default

Shopify sells gift cards without any app. The Shopify Help Center describes it like this (German pages retrieved on 5 October 2026; in English: gift cards overview and customising gift card pages and notifications):

• Selling: gift cards are available on all Shopify plans. You create a gift card product; when an order containing it is fulfilled, the gift card is created.
• Arriving: the customer or the recipient receives a digital gift card with a unique code in a notification email. In the online store, a buyer can only add a recipient if the theme supports the fields for it.
• Redeeming: the code is entered at checkout.
• Customising: the gift card page with value and code is part of the theme and can be styled there. You replace the default gift card image in the email by editing the notification template; according to Shopify that takes HTML, CSS and Liquid. According to Shopify, the 16-digit redemption codes are generated at random and cannot be customised.

Shopify mentions physical gift cards only for Shopify POS: in supported countries they can be ordered from the Shopify Hardware Store. Neither help page mentions a folded card or a PDF to print. Anyone who wants to give the gift card a shape of its own, with a name, a message and a fold, needs a tool for it. From here on, this guide is about that route.

Step 1: Set up your appearance

Set-up takes three steps: privacy, plan and “Your appearance”. In the last one you decide what appears on every gift card from your shop:

• Name on the card: up to 60 characters. Leave it empty and the name from your shop address is used.
• Logo: for light areas.
• Version for dark areas: a second logo version so your logo stays legible on a dark background.

Step 2: Pick a template and a fold

On the “Design a voucher” page you first choose how the card is folded: folded once as a folding card with two sides, or folded twice as a cross-fold with four sides. Then the template. There are six:

• Classic: cream paper at the top, a full-bleed photo below, the amount set large in a serif.
• Minimal: pure white with a narrow image strip at the fold, the amount in a sans serif.
• Typographic: the words GIFT VOUCHER run up the fold (GUTSCHEIN on German cards), no decorative areas.
• Warm: two-colour print on kraft paper, photo at the top, terracotta area below.
• Bold: solid red with nothing but the amount in white.
• Photographic: a borderless photo across the whole front with a light band on top.

Changes appear in the preview straight away. It is built on the server from the same document as the PDF later on; a test print before going live is still worth it (see step 3). All six at a glance, with what each one comes with, are on Shopify gift card templates.

Step 3: Design freely in the editor

The template is a starting point, not a straitjacket. In the “Design freely” tab you take it apart element by element:

• Select and change: click any element in the preview. Dragging moves it, the corner at the bottom right resizes it.
• Add: insert text, shapes, images, your logo and your shop name yourself.
• Handwriting: besides the text fonts, the typeface list has a “Handwriting” group with eight typefaces: two scripts, a school cursive, a brush script, pen handwriting, a hand-printed face, a playful one and narrow capitals. All of them have umlauts, ß and €.
• Swap images: replace an existing image with another one or with a new upload. Position, size, rotation and opacity stay as they were.
• Colours: the colour card shows the colours of your design. Change one and it is replaced everywhere it appears. To colour a single layer, use its properties.
• Without a mouse: tab to the element, Enter selects it, the arrow keys move it, with Shift they resize, with Alt in fine steps.

Save the design under its own name. Before it goes live, use “Download a voucher to check it” and print a test copy: at original size (100 %, not “fit to page”), folded with the printed side facing out.

Step 4: Publish the gift card

The design becomes a product in your shop. On the “Publish” page, Kartuu creates it under “Create a new voucher”:

• Type of voucher: an amount voucher is a sum to spend in the shop; on purchase Kartuu creates a genuine Shopify gift card with its own code. A service voucher stands for a service instead of a sum, say three hours of massage. You redeem it yourself, not the checkout.
• Title and amounts: the title appears as it is in your shop. Each amount becomes its own variant, up to 50.
• Design: pick a saved design. You can swap it for another at any time, even after the product exists.

That way you can create as many gift card products as you like, each with its own design. You change the title and amounts of an existing gift card directly in Shopify afterwards.

Three steps are yours, and Kartuu’s start page walks you through them as a checklist: make the product available on the Online Store sales channel in Shopify, place the Kartuu block on the product page in the theme editor, and place the Kartuu block on the thank-you and order status pages in the checkout editor, where it is listed under its German name “Kartuu Gutschein abrufen”. Without the first block, the buyer cannot say what goes on the card. Without the second, the card only reaches the recipient by email, and without email sending not at all: then you download it under “Orders” and hand it over yourself.

Step 5 (optional): Let the buyer pick the picture

Up to here every card sold carries the same artwork. Anyone who wanted to offer Christmas, a birthday and a neutral occasion needed three gift card products. Since 20 September 2026 one will do: under “Change the design” there is a section called “Let the buyer pick the picture”.

• Up to four pictures per voucher. You decide which ones are on offer. Each gets a short caption: it becomes the alt text of the tile in your shop.
• Upload and delete where you need it. The picture chooser has “Upload a picture”, and under every tile there is “Delete picture”; no detour through the editor.
• Only pictures nothing depends on are deleted. If a picture is still in use as a logo, in a design, in a picture choice or in a voucher that has already been issued, Kartuu says where and does not delete it. The last case cannot be resolved, and that is deliberate: an issued card should still look the way it did at purchase a year from now.
• Twenty pictures per shop. Everything in the store counts: logos, the artwork in your designs and the pictures on offer. Uploading the same picture again costs no space.

On the product page the pictures appear as small tiles. The buyer clicks one, the preview switches straight away, and the card they buy carries exactly that picture. Everything else stays your design: colours, template, logo and every other picture on the card. Only the one place you set aside for it is swapped. Buyers cannot upload their own photos, and your shop’s product images stay untouched.

Two things are needed: the Kartuu block on the product page (step 4) and a design with a swappable picture slot. All six templates have one; if you built your own card under “Design freely”, mark a picture in it as swappable. Offer no pictures and nothing changes: the product page looks as it did before.

What buyers and recipients get

On the product page the buyer enters who the gift card is for and what it should say, and sees the card in a preview as they type, with the amount they chose and the picture they picked, roughly as it will print. Then they pay at Shopify’s checkout as usual and download the card straight afterwards on the thank-you page, as a PDF with fold marks on A4, or on US Letter for shops in the US and Canada (setting “English (US)” under Settings, “Language and paper size”). The block on the thank-you page appears in English, or in German if the buyer shops in German.

If you have set up email sending through your own mailbox, Kartuu also sends the card to the recipient, on a day of the buyer’s choosing if they like. The recipient can forward it or print and fold it. For an amount voucher, the code on it is a genuine Shopify gift card: it appears in your shop’s gift card overview and is redeemed at checkout as normal.

What exactly is on the printed card and how it reaches the buyer is summed up on printable Shopify gift cards.

Checklist

1. Add your name, logo and the logo version for dark areas.
2. Choose the fold: folding card or cross-fold.
3. Start from one of the six templates.
4. Adapt colours, images and text to your shop in the “Design freely” editor.
5. Save the design and print a test copy at original size.
6. On the “Publish” page, create a voucher: type, title, amounts, design.
7. Optional: offer up to four pictures under “Change the design”.
8. Make the product available on the Online Store sales channel in Shopify.
9. Place the Kartuu block on the product page.
10. Place the Kartuu block on the thank-you and order status pages.
11. Optional: set up email sending.

Pricing, data storage and languages are covered on the KYTH.Kartuu page. How Kartuu compares with other apps is in the overview Shopify gift card apps compared 2026.