Behind the Scenes: How We Designed Giftek for Companies, Employees, and Merchants
Written by Ahmed Taha, CCO & Co-Founder at Giftek
Digital gift cards often look simple from the outside. A company sends a reward, an employee redeems it, and a merchant receives a payment. But when we started building Giftek, we quickly realized that simplicity on the surface only works when the complexity underneath is handled carefully. And that complexity doesn’t come from technology, it comes from people. So before designing features, flows, or dashboards, we started by listening.
Designing the Product Around Real Conversations
Giftek didn’t start with assumptions about what HR teams, employees, or merchants should want. It started with understanding what they were already struggling with.
We interviewed 40 HR professionals across companies of different sizes, industries, and levels of experience. In parallel, we surveyed 500 employees to understand how rewards are actually perceived and used in day-to-day life. We also spent time speaking with merchants to understand how gift cards fit or fail to fit into their revenue models.
What we learned reshaped the product entirely.
What HR Teams Really Needed
Across conversations with HR leaders, one theme kept coming back. Rewards were not the problem, managing them was.
Budgets already existed. Programs already ran. The friction came from everything around execution. Cash incentives were fast but invisible. Vouchers created manual work, follow-ups, and reconciliation issues. Measuring impact was often postponed because it was simply too hard.
What HR teams were asking for, implicitly, was not more creative rewards, but a system that respected how they work.
Programs repeat. Budgets need guardrails. Reporting must be clean and defensible. Setup should not take weeks or training.
That’s why Giftek was designed to prioritize control, visibility, and speed by default, not as optional features, but as the foundation of the product.
What Employees Told Us Without Saying Much
Employees were far less interested in reward mechanics than we expected.
In the survey responses, there was very little appetite for complex systems, portals, or explanations. What stood out instead was how quickly a reward loses its perceived value when it requires effort to use.
Employees wanted rewards that felt immediate, practical, and aligned with brands and services they already use.
This insight led us to simplify aggressively. Digital delivery had to be instant. Redemption had to be intuitive. And flexibility had to be built in, so rewards could naturally fit into everyday spending, not feel like a separate task.
If employees don’t use a reward easily, it doesn’t matter how generous it is.
Why Merchants Couldn’t Be an Afterthought
Many reward platforms treat merchants as distribution endpoints. We chose not to.
When speaking with merchants, a different kind of frustration surfaced. Customer acquisition was becoming more expensive, promotions were driving short-term traffic but weak loyalty, and demand was increasingly unpredictable.
What merchants valued wasn’t exposure, it was certainty.
Gift cards, when designed correctly, offered something different. Instead of chasing customers through ads or discounts, merchants could receive customers who were already funded by their employers, arriving with intent to spend.
This perspective shaped how Giftek handled redemption, tracking, and settlement. Merchants weren’t added to the ecosystem to participate in rewards, but to receive a reliable stream of prepaid demand.
Designing for an Ecosystem, Not a Single User
The hardest design challenge wasn’t building for HR, employees, or merchants individually. It was making sure improvements for one didn’t come at the expense of the others.
Every major product decision was filtered through three questions. Does this give companies better control and visibility. Does this make the experience simpler for employees. Does this create real, sustainable value for merchants.
When one side wins disproportionately, the system eventually breaks. That’s why Giftek was designed as a connected ecosystem, not a rewards tool, not a merchant platform, and not a benefit app.
What This Looks Like in Practice
The result is a platform where sending a reward feels simple, but the complexity is absorbed quietly in the background. Budgets are controlled, usage is visible, redemption is smooth, and value flows naturally between all sides.
None of this came from theory. It came from listening, testing, and refining based on real-world behavior.
Final Thought
Digital gift cards work best when they’re designed for everyone involved, not just the buyer or the user.
By building Giftek around the realities of HR teams, employees, and merchants, we didn’t just create a rewards product. We created a system for moving value in a way that makes sense for modern businesses.