Gift cards have become a popular way to give someone a gift or say "thank you".  My wife who is a teacher that puts a lot of effort into the nurturing and education of her students is usually rewarded many times during the year with gift cards and other presents.

In the case of a teacher's gift, where you may not know a lot about an individual who has earned a "thank you" gift, gift cards are a wonderful idea.  For close relatives and friends however, gift cards are best used in combination with other items that convey your understanding and caring for the other person.

Regarding the use of gift cards in the on-line shopping market, there are a few things you should be aware.  The most important of which is that gift cards can be very problematic.

Purchasing a gift card is essentially equivalent to opening a checking account with a preset balance that anyone who has the checkbook can write checks against!  Of course in the case of a gift card there is no checkbook.  The gift card itself is the checkbook, and whomever has the gift card can spend the money in the checking account.

Vendors such as AccessorizeYourVehicle.com go to great length to provide a safe and secure shopping environment for their customers.  In the on-line world, earning your customer's trust is a primary key to success. One of the things we do to earn your trust is to delay the capture of any credit card funds until after your products have been shipped.  Using a regular credit card, this is accomplished by getting a credit card authorization at the time of purchase, and then submitting a request for funds to the credit card company when we are notified that your products have shipped.

With gift cards, or even debit cards for that matter, delayed capture of funds is not support by the credit card companies. This becomes a problem because, we don't know that you are using a gift card until we ask the credit card company for the authorization.  This is actually a three step process.

First, we submit the transaction to what is called a payment gateway.  The payment gateway is responsible verifying that your transaction passes all of the fraud checks that we have requested.  Secondly, the payment gateway then contacts the credit card company with the information you provide to get request the authorization and return the information required to verify the order.

Because of the unique nature of gift cards, authorizing a purchase essentially takes the money needed to cover the purchase, and deducts it from your gift card's balance.  This prevents you from overdrawing your gift cards.

The final step of the process occurs when the payment gateway applies the fraud and other checks needed to verify that we have a valid transaction.  Gift cards always fail the standard fraud checks, because the issuer does not have your address information.  Comparing the billing address entered on your order against the credit card's billing address is a basic test that all transactions must pass.  When the transaction is rejected for any reason, the gateway tells our shopping cart that the transaction failed. 

This is where the problem exists, because the gateway cannot tell the credit card company to restore your balance.  Restoring balances can only be done with a phone call to the card issuer and takes 48 - 72 hours to complete.

So please, when you are shopping on-line, use a regular card for on-line purchases.  Any web site you shop at should be performing fraud checks on every transaction to protect you.  If a web site is accepting gift cards, they are not protecting the public against identity theft.