With the arrival of June, the summer season officially begins, bringing with it a period of travel, increased mobility, and, of course, weddings. While most companies during this time focus exclusively on attracting new summer customers, an extremely important segment of buyers often remains overlooked in the background. These are the customers who have been keeping your gift cards in their wallets or email inboxes for months, waiting for the right moment to redeem them.

In this edition of the newsletter, we dive into the financial and marketing secrets of successful gift program management. We reveal an exciting story about wedding gifts that illustrates the phenomenon of unspent funds, and analyze how you can reactivate this sleeping capital in time for the main summer vacations. Furthermore, we look into the future of online sales, where intelligent software agents are taking center stage.

The SmartGifty team wishes you an enjoyable read and a successful jump into the summer season!

The arrival of June brings summer vacations closer, and most companies focus their energy on attracting new customers with summer campaigns. In doing so, they often overlook a segment of buyers who have already shown the highest level of trust, those who have been keeping your gift cards in their wallets or email inboxes for months.

In the world of gift card management, there is a term that puts a smile on the faces of chief financial officers …

With June, buying habits change radically. Your customers are no longer confined to their homes behind their computers; they are on the go, in the field, on terraces, or in tourist centres. They shop spontaneously via mobile devices and consume services physically.

If you want to catch this summer wave, your digital and physical worlds must not operate separately. Here is a quick summer test for your system:

• Mobile optimization on the beach: Can a customer, while lying on the beach, buy an e-gift card or coupon on their phone in three clicks and immediately send it to a friend for their birthday?

• Seamless redemption on location: When a customer arrives at your checkout or reception with their hands full of beach gear, can the staff quickly and easily scan the barcode from their smartphone? Or does the process require manual typing of long codes, calling the manager, and causing a line?

Practical step for June: Before the biggest summer rush begins, conduct a "test purchase journey." Buy a card on your phone yourself and try to redeem it at your physical location. Eliminating just one secondary barrier or source of friction in this process can significantly increase summer revenue and ease your employees' workload during the vacation season.

While most companies are still fine-tuning their summer campaigns to persuade human shoppers, the biggest shift in the history of online sales is quietly unfolding in the background of digital transformation. We are steadily marching into an era where the buyer on the other side of the screen is no longer a human, but their personal software representative—an AI agent.

In this issue, retail strategist, four-time author, and pop-up expert Ghalia Boustani takes us beyond the hype of temporary retail to reveal the operational engine behind successful brand activations. In The Pop-Up Playbook: Management Strategies for Experiential Retail Success, she argues that pop-ups have evolved from simple short-term marketing stunts into a critical, multi-billion-dollar strategic channel.

AI agents are beginning to reshape how consumers discover, compare and buy products. The question is no longer whether agentic commerce will arrive but how quickly companies can adapt.

For years, digital commerce revolved around optimizing the customer journey for human users: Better storefronts, better search functions, better marketing funnels. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) claimed to be the road to success.