GiftPraise is a fully digital service. There's nothing to post, no shipping delays and no waiting in for a courier.
When you send
You record a video, leave a voice note or write your message, choose a digital gift card to go with it, and add the people you're sending to. You can send straight away or pick the day it should arrive. Once you've paid, you'll get an order confirmation by email.
When it arrives
At the time you chose, each recipient gets their own private link. Email is how it always arrives, and if you gave us their mobile number they get an SMS as well, so it is harder to miss. The link is theirs alone: everyone you send to gets a separate one, so nobody sees anyone else's.
There's nothing for them to sign up for or install. They open the link, your message plays first, and their gift is revealed at the end.
Digital gift cards
Where a digital gift card is included, it's issued electronically the moment you pay, and each recipient gets their own. When they open their GiftPraise, the card details are emailed to them, so the code arrives in their own inbox rather than sitting on a page that anyone holding the link could read. There is no physical card and nothing to redeem in store unless the gift card issuer specifies otherwise.
Lost the email?
If a recipient cannot find the email carrying their gift card, they do not need it. Anyone can create a free account with the address the gift was sent to, and every GiftPraise sent to that address is waiting on their Received page, gift card code and all.
That works for gifts received before the account existed. Gifts are matched to the email address they were sent to, not to when someone signed up, so a card sent months ago is still there. There is still nothing to sign up for in order to receive a GiftPraise: the link in the email is all a recipient ever needs, and the account is simply somewhere to find it again.
Delivery times
Your order confirmation is emailed as soon as you pay. The gift card is ordered at that same moment, before anything is sent to anyone: we never deliver a GiftPraise without the gift already behind it.
If you chose to send straight away, we hold it for 5 minutes first so you have a moment to change your mind, then send. Recipients usually hear within a few minutes of your payment going through. The gift card is bought immediately either way, so the pause costs the recipient nothing. If you picked a date and time, it goes out at roughly the time you chose rather than at some fixed hour of the morning.
Everyone you send to gets an email. Where you gave us a mobile number, they get an SMS at the same time as well: the SMS is an extra, not a replacement, so a recipient never depends on it alone.
If a send-straight-away GiftPraise has not arrived within an hour, or a scheduled one is more than an hour past its time, please check the spam folder first and then contact hello@giftpraise.com and we will look into it.
Changing the delivery time
If you picked a date and time, you can move it yourself. Your order confirmation email carries a "Change delivery time" link, and the same link sits next to the gift on your account page. The link is all you need, so you can use it without signing in.
You can move it up to 10 minutes before it is due, and to any time within the next 90 days. Everything else stays exactly as you set it: the same message, the same gift and the same recipients. We will email you to confirm the new time. Your recipients are not told anything, because they were never told when to expect it in the first place.
A GiftPraise you chose to send straight away can be changed too, for about 5 minutes after you pay. That is not a race: we deliberately hold it for those minutes rather than sending the moment it is ready, so the offer is real for as long as we make it. Use the same link to give it a date and time. After that it goes out and the time is fixed.
Once a scheduled GiftPraise is inside that last 10 minutes, or any GiftPraise has already gone out, the time can no longer be changed. If you need to stop a gift rather than move it, see Cancelling before it sends.
What the SMS looks like
Our SMS comes from GiftPraise rather than a phone number, and the link in it is a short send.gifts address, which keeps the whole message inside a single segment. Both are worth knowing in advance. An unexpected SMS from an unfamiliar number, carrying a link to a domain you have never seen, is exactly what a scam looks like, and a recipient who is unsure now has something to check it against.
Because the sender is a name rather than a number, the SMS is one way: replying to it will not reach us or the person who sent the GiftPraise. There is nothing to opt out of either, since we only ever message someone a sender has specifically asked us to reach about their gift, and we never message them again afterwards. If a recipient would rather not receive an SMS at all, the sender can leave the mobile number out and the GiftPraise arrives by email alone.
If the address was wrong
A mistyped email address is the easiest thing in the world to do, and until you hear otherwise it looks exactly like a gift that arrived. So we watch for it. If the email we send is refused because the address does not exist, we notice, and we email you to say we could not reach them.
We also stop. The gift card is held rather than sent on to the same address, because a gift card is a bearer token: whoever opens that email can spend it, and an address you did not mean to type may belong to someone real. Nothing is lost while it waits, and the card stays yours until it reaches the person you meant.
Correcting it takes one field. The email we send links straight to that recipient, and the same page sits behind your orders. Put in the right address and we send the GiftPraise again, with the gift card following when they open it. The old link stops working at that moment, so a gift that went to the wrong inbox cannot still be opened from it.
A mailbox that is simply full is a different thing, and we treat it as one: that is temporary, so we keep going rather than troubling you about it.
If something goes wrong
If a gift card can't be issued, our team is alerted automatically and we'll contact you to put it right, including a refund of the gift where we can't issue it. We'll also email you the first time each recipient opens their GiftPraise.