Starting soon, you’ll be able to give and receive an all-purpose, reusable Facebook Gift Card through Facebook’s Gifts platform. This physical gift card will be able to store gift amounts from various businesses, including Target, Jamba Juice, Olive Garden, and Sephora.
This “new type of gift card” is simply called the Facebook Card. It’s an actual gift card that you’ll get in the mail, pre-loaded with an amount from one of the retailers mentioned above.
The Facebook Card is part of Facebook Gifts, and that’s where you head if you want to give it to one of your friends. Once you open up Facebook Gifts, simply choose the “Gift Cards & Digital” category. Up until now, that category only offered iTunes gift cards and then various types of digital subscriptions – Hulu, Rdio, magazines, etc. When the ability to send a Facebook Card gift rolls out to you, you’ll see the aforementioned retailers listed in the category.
Once you select a gift card amount, let’s say $50 to Target, that amount will be loaded onto the Facebook Card and shipped to the recipient.
“Facebook Cards are reusable. After you’ve received a card, the next time you get a Facebook Card gift, it will instantly be added to your existing card. Your card can hold multiple gift balances, and each balance is dedicated to the retailer associated with the gift. For example, you might have gift balances of $100 at Sephora, $75 at Target, $50 at Olive Garden, and $8.25 at Jamba Juice,” says Facebook.
So the Facebook Card is like a giant, overarching gift card for your gift cards. At least, that’s what it could become once Facebook gets more retail partners. Let’s say you wanted to give someone a $25 gift card to Sephora for their birthday. Instead of going to the mall and picking up a specific Sephora gift card, all you’d have to do is give them the $25 gift via Facebook Gifts and it will pop up as an available balance on their Facebook Card.
Once this feature rolls out, users with Facebook Cards will be able to check their balances at various retailers in their Facebook account settings. You can also receive notifications whenever the balance on your Facebook Card changes.
