Bulk Gift Cards: How to Send Gift Cards to Hundreds of People at Once
How to send gift cards to hundreds of people at once: real bulk order sizes (25 to 950 cards), the CSV walkthrough with screenshots, recipient choice, and how unspent funds come back.
Quick answer: to send gift cards to hundreds of people at once, use a digital platform with a CSV upload: one spreadsheet with an email column, one upload, and every recipient gets a link to choose their own card. On Hoppier, a 900-person same-day send is a real order we fulfilled this year - and whatever recipients don't spend comes back to your balance instead of disappearing as breakage.
Somewhere right now, a person is standing at a drugstore rack counting out forty $50 gift cards, and later tonight they'll be stuffing envelopes. This post is for that person. Here's how bulk gift card sending actually works in 2026, with real numbers from the orders we process: how big these orders get, when companies send them, the exact CSV walkthrough, and what happens to the money nobody spends.
What counts as a bulk gift card order?
From our order data, a typical bulk send for a single event runs 100 to 200 cards. The small end is around 25 to 50 - a team lunch, a webinar incentive batch. The largest single-day order we fulfilled this year was roughly 950 cards, for an in-person conference that wanted every attendee holding a meal card at the same time.
Plenty of customers send far more than that over a year, but those orders are spread across months - birthday programs, quarterly rewards, rolling survey incentives. What makes a send "bulk" isn't the annual total; it's needing a lot of cards to land at once, which is exactly where buying them one at a time breaks down.
When companies send gift cards in bulk
The biggest spike, by a wide margin, is the holidays - Thanksgiving and Christmas gifts for employees and customers, leaning heavily toward meals: delivery apps, restaurants, and open Visa cards recipients can use anywhere food is sold. The second wave is January sales kickoffs and new-year events, where a few hundred people in one room (or one Zoom) all need lunch or a spiff at the same moment.
The rest of the year, bulk sends are the engine behind recognition programs, survey incentives, and event marketing - same mechanics, smaller batches.
The Costco run: why people stop buying plastic
Most of our best customers arrive after trying two or three alternatives first, and one of those alternatives is almost always a stack of physical cards from a big-box store or a drugstore.
Physical gifting is quite challenging. You have to buy in person, package in person, and mail them - or distribute them around the office. It's very time consuming. And it's very easy to misplace one or two cards, and when each card has $50 or $100 on it, that's an aggravating thing to lose.
Nick Galipeau, Hoppier
That's the whole case for digital in one paragraph: no driving, no envelopes, no shrinkage. A digital card can't fall behind a desk, and if an email bounces you just resend the link. The budget exposure of a lost card simply doesn't exist.
How to send gift cards to hundreds of people: the walkthrough
Two ways in: hand the job to your AI agent, or run it in the dashboard. Either way your recipient list is one CSV - and you can upload it to Claude or straight into Hoppier.
Step 1: The fast path - one message to your agent
Connect Claude or ChatGPT to the Hoppier MCP and the whole job collapses into one message: "Create a $25 lunch program and add these 200 people." Drop your CSV into the chat and the agent reads it, creates the program, loads the recipients, and sends. Guardrails - merchant restrictions, spend windows, per-card caps - are enforced on Hoppier's servers, so the agent can't exceed the budget you set no matter what gets typed.
Prefer to see every click? The dashboard flow below is the same four steps the agent runs for you, and it's identical whether your list has 10 rows or 10,000.
Step 2: Create your program and pick the vendor list
Set the budget per person, the spend window, and which brands recipients can choose from - a curated lunch list, a retail list, or the open Visa option.
Step 3: Download the CSV template
This is where people get stuck - usually in the thirty seconds before they realize a template exists. It's built into the dashboard. The only column you truly need is email. First name, last name, and company are optional but worth filling in: they keep tracking and reporting organized when the list is long.
Step 4: Upload your list - to Hoppier or to Claude
Export the list from wherever it lives - your HRIS, your CRM, a Google Sheet - and upload it to Hoppier, which validates the rows and flags anything malformed before a dollar moves. Or hand the same file to Claude with the MCP connected and let it do the loading.
Step 5: Review and send
You see the full order - recipients, amounts, total - before confirming. Cards land by email within minutes.
Recipients pick their own card (this is the part people get excited about)
Each person gets one link and chooses from the vendors you allowed: DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Starbucks, local-friendly Visa, and so on. If someone lives near a great independent restaurant instead of a chain, the Visa option covers it.
Personally, when I use a Hoppier card, I mostly use it for coffee. I load it onto my Apple Wallet, go get my coffee, and enjoy it. Recipients find it really freeing to pick something nearby that they actually enjoy, instead of being stuck with one vendor.
Nick Galipeau, Hoppier
For the sender, choice isn't just a nicety - it's what drives redemption up. A card someone wanted is a card someone uses.
What happens to the money nobody spends
Run the math on a 50-person team lunch: maybe 45 people show up, and maybe 20 of those spend the full amount. Everyone else leaves a few dollars - or the whole card - on the table. With traditional gift cards you forfeit all of it. The industry average for that forfeited value (the term is breakage) is around 30%; across 2,090 programs on our own platform, 37% of gift value goes unspent.
On Hoppier, unspent funds return to your balance when the spend window closes, ready for the next event. It's the single biggest line-item difference between platforms, and for most buyers it decides the purchase.
"Can you send to Singapore?" - the question every buyer asks first
The number one pre-purchase question isn't about price. It's "I have staff in Singapore, Australia, Spain, and the US - can you reach all of them?" Because Hoppier runs on Visa's network - the largest card infrastructure in the world - the answer is yes: recipients in 60+ countries redeem in their own currency, from brands that actually exist where they live.
FAQ
How many gift cards can I send at once?
There's no practical ceiling. Typical bulk orders run 100-200 cards; the largest single-day send we processed this year was about 950. The CSV flow is identical at any size.
Do I need anything besides email addresses?
No. Email is the only required column in the CSV. First name, last name, and company are recommended for cleaner tracking, but a one-column list works.
Can recipients in different countries get different cards?
Yes - each recipient sees brands available in their own country and currency from the vendor list you set, plus the prepaid Visa option.
Can my AI agent handle the bulk send for me?
Yes - connect Claude or ChatGPT to the Hoppier MCP and ask it to create the program and add your list. Spend limits and merchant restrictions are enforced server-side.
What if someone never uses their card?
On Hoppier Plus plans, 100% of unspent value returns to your balance after the spend window. With store-bought cards, that money is gone.
Ready to retire the drugstore run? Start with the bulk gift cards page for brand-by-brand options, or create your first program - the CSV template is waiting in the dashboard.
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