For the past year, the Team and I have been working incredibly hard on leveling up your gifting experience on Shopify. I'm super excited about the new features that we're releasing, but more importantly the quality of life updates in the backend of the app. Making it easier for you to focus on your business.
With that said, let’s take a look at what’s new here at Govalo.
- Rob Shipway, CPO
#1 - Giftable products in beta
Crafting a truly great gifting strategy and experience is about more than just the products you sell. It’s about figuring out how to solve some of your customers’ most common issues when they go to purchase a gift. One such issue is uncertainty over the finer details like choosing a size, or entering the correct address if sending a gift directly to a recipient.
That’s why we’re working on our latest feature - giftable products. This will enable the option to send a product as a gift on product pages, allowing customers greater flexibility in gift purchasing.
Here’s how it works:
1 - The customer opts to send the product as a gift.
2 - They enter the recipient’s email address, along with a gift note and scheduled date like they would a gift card.
3 - The recipient redeems the gift by selecting their preferred variant, and entering their details.
4 - The original customer is sent a prefilled checkout to complete the purchase.
5 - The merchant fulfills the order using the details provided.
This feature is currently in Beta, and will soon be available to all of our Premium and Enterprise merchants.
Click here to read our support documentation about giftable products.
#2 - Updated email templates
We’ve also made it easier to customize email templates from within the Govalo dashboard. We have consolidated the email template configurations for all the features and integrations into a single page.
We also show on this page what source the email is being sent through. In the template editor you can change the source to any email integration you have configured/enabled.
The template editor page is now also full screen, taking advantage of some extra screen real estate.
#3 - Gift card open tracking
What happens to a gift card after it’s purchased? The redemption and customer experience for the recipient is key, and having visibility on whether or not a gift card has actually been opened is vital to that. Govalo can now track when gift cards or store credit are opened.
You can see the status in the table listing, as well as being able to filter by opened or unopened. This can allow you to do a couple of crucial tasks. The first is in sending reminder emails to recipients, or even to the original customer, so that a gift card doesn’t get missed in their inbox. The second is in delivering better, faster customer service. If a customer gets in touch as they’re unsure if a gift card was actually received, your support team can clearly see what’s going on rather than having to try and reach out to the recipient.
In case you missed it - Highlights from Q2
Giftable subscriptions via Bold Subscriptions and Recharge
This summer was big if your store sells subscriptions as we launched our integrations with Bold Commerce and Recharge to make real gift subscriptions a reality. Our integration removes a lot of the friction and frustration from the purchasing process when a customer wants to send a subscription as a gift. It becomes its own product, delivered directly to the recipient without any account set-up. The recipient then redeems it whenever they want to, and sets up their account to manage as they would any other subscription with their own payment details for when the gifted period is over.
Learn more about our integration with Bold here, and our integration with Recharge here.
Govalo Event Timeline
Visibility over what’s going on behind the scenes with different orders and customers is essential to understanding your customers and delivering on efficient customer service. Especially with gifts, this adds further complication as you’re not just dealing with one customer and the product they received, you’re dealing with the original customer, their recipient, and the product sent to them. To improve that essential visibility and improve your team’s ability to swiftly deal with support tickets, we introduced our event timeline. It displays key actions related to a given gift card order such as when the gift card was sent, along with details of the sender and recipient.
Learn more about this in our support documentation here.
Email customization via Klaviyo and Drip
Earlier we spoke about the importance of email in the customer experience, which is why we’ve been committed to making it easier for more merchants to customize their strategy with ESPs. As well as our recent Omnisend integration, we also launched integrations with Klaviyo and Drip.
Learn more about our Klaviyo integration here, and our Drip integration here.
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This is just what we’ve shipped recently, we’ve got a lot more on the roadmap! As we head into Q4 with Black Friday and the holiday season on the horizon, we’re looking forward to seeing how our merchants make full use of the features and integrations we currently have available. Let’s end the year with a bang!