Your Gift Vouchers Are a Five-Year Promise Your Website Has to Keep

A gift voucher is the only thing most businesses sell where the money arrives on one date and the work happens on another, possibly years later. Everything else you sell is a transaction. A voucher is a commitment with a date on it.

Since 2 December 2019 that commitment has had a legal minimum length in Ireland, along with a set of terms you are not permitted to write into it. Most owner-operators selling vouchers through their own site have never read those terms, and that is not carelessness. The settings screen in a plugin or a store builder does not mention the legislation. It asks you for an expiry period and offers twelve months as a helpful default.

Twelve months is not lawful for a gift voucher sold in this country. Neither is six.

This piece is a reference. What the law requires, when the VAT actually falls due, which is rarely when owners assume, and how to configure the whole thing on a website you control.

What Irish Law Counts as a Gift Voucher

The Consumer Protection (Gift Vouchers) Act 2019 inserted a new Part 4A into the Consumer Protection Act 2007, and its definition is deliberately wide. A gift voucher is any voucher, coupon, document or instrument, including in electronic form, intended to be used as a substitute for money in paying for goods or services, or otherwise exchanged for them.

Electronic form matters. The PDF your site emails at the point of purchase is a gift voucher in exactly the same way a printed card in a paper wallet is.

The Act then carves out a list of things that are not caught. Loyalty scheme rewards are excluded. So are promotional vouchers tied to specified goods or services for a limited period not exceeding three months, refund vouchers issued when goods come back, cheques and bank drafts, electronic money, vouchers redeemable only against utilities or telephone and internet services, and anything not made available to be given as a gift.

So the stamp card in your café, the twenty per cent off code you push out before a bank holiday weekend, and the credit note you hand someone returning a jumper all sit outside these rules. The €100 voucher your website sells to a customer buying a present sits squarely inside them. One product on your site, one set of obligations, and most owners have both categories running through the same checkout without realising they are treated differently.

Five Years Minimum, and the Paperwork Offence Beside It

Section 66B(1) of the amended Act gives you two lawful options. The voucher carries an expiry date at least five years from the date the contract was entered into, or it carries no expiry date at all. There is no third option.

If your terms say something shorter, the Act does not simply void that term and leave you to argue about it. The contract is deemed to include a five-year expiry, and that deemed term overrides whatever you wrote. A trader who enters into a gift voucher contract contrary to that provision commits an offence.

The second requirement is the one that catches careful businesses, because it is administrative rather than commercial. Under section 66B(2) you must specify, either on the voucher itself or on a durable medium supplied with it, the expiry date, or the contract date together with the redemption period, or the fact that no expiry applies. Failing to do that is a separate offence on summary conviction.

A durable medium, as the Act defines it, includes paper and email, provided the information stays accessible for future reference and can be reproduced unchanged. The confirmation email your site sends after a voucher purchase is therefore not a nicety. It is the compliance record, and if your form asks for the recipient's email but never sends anything to the buyer, you have no record at all.

Your voucher terms belong in writing on the site too, sitting alongside the other legal pages an Irish business website needs rather than buried in a checkout tickbox nobody reads.

What that means at the counter is simple. Somebody arrives in year three holding a voucher your old settings said had lapsed in year one. The law says it is live. If you turn them away you have refused a valid customer, and you have done it in front of whoever gave them the gift.

Partial Redemption and the €1 Balance

Two more terms are prohibited outright, and both of them describe how a voucher behaves after it has been used once.

You cannot require the whole value to be spent in one go

Section 66B(3) prohibits any term requiring the full value of a gift voucher to be redeemed in a single transaction. That rules out the common shortcut of treating a code as a one-shot token that is burned on first use, whatever the customer actually spent.

Your website has to track a balance. Not a status of used or unused, a balance, held against the code and visible to whoever is serving the customer. A voucher system that cannot do arithmetic is not a voucher system.

If the balance is €1 or more, you may owe it back

Section 66B(4) is narrower than it first appears, and the detail is worth getting right. Where a customer redeems part of a voucher, the remaining balance is €1 or more, and the contract contains a term preventing that balance from being redeemed in another transaction, the contract is deemed to require you to reimburse the balance. That reimbursement can be in cash, by electronic transfer, or by way of a replacement voucher. Where you choose a replacement voucher, section 66B(5) requires it to carry the balance in full and an expiry date no earlier than the expiry on the original.

Read the trigger carefully. It bites when your terms block the leftover from being spent later. Run a system that simply lets people come back and spend the rest, and you never reach it.

The name on the voucher

Where a voucher must be redeemed by a named person, section 66B(6) requires that the person can redeem it even if the name on the voucher differs from the name on their passport, driving licence or other identification, and that the name can be amended without a fee. If your booking form captures a recipient name, this applies to you.

SPV or MPV: When the VAT Actually Falls Due

This is the part that surprises people, and it has nothing to do with consumer law. Revenue's Tax and Duty Manual on vouchers, last reviewed in September 2025, splits vouchers into two categories that decide when you account for the VAT.

A single-purpose voucher is one where, at the time of issue, both the place of supply and the VAT due on the underlying goods or services are known. In practice that means everything the voucher can be spent on carries a single rate of VAT. For a single-purpose voucher, Revenue is unambiguous: the VAT is due in the VAT period in which the voucher is sold. And where such a voucher is never redeemed, or only partly redeemed, no adjustment can be made for the non-redemption.

A multi-purpose voucher is any voucher that is not a single-purpose voucher, typically because it can be spent across goods and services at different rates. There, no VAT arises on issue. VAT is accounted for in the taxable period the voucher is redeemed, and if a multi-purpose voucher is never redeemed at all, no VAT is due.

Consider what that does to cash flow. A treatment room selling vouchers that can only be exchanged for services at one rate is issuing single-purpose vouchers, so the VAT on a strong December leaves with the next return, months before anybody books in. Where the voucher can instead be spent across a mixed-rate menu, the money sits with you until redemption. Same website, same product page, different timing on real cash.

Classification depends on what your voucher can actually buy, which is a decision you make when you write the product description. Get your accountant to confirm which side of the line yours falls on before your first big season, not after it.

What the Law Requires, and What to Set

Requirement	Where it comes from	What to configure
Expiry at least five years, or none at all	Section 66B(1)	Set the expiry field to 60 months or disable expiry entirely
Expiry stated in writing on a durable medium	Section 66B(2)	Enable the purchase confirmation email and put the date in it
No term forcing the full value into one transaction	Section 66B(3)	Turn on partial redemption and balance tracking
Name changes honoured without a fee	Section 66B(6)	Allow recipient name edits from the dashboard

Four settings. On most platforms they sit on one screen, and on most sites at least one of them is wrong on the day the first voucher sells.

The Platform Decides What You Are Allowed to Offer

Everything above assumes your website can be configured to match Irish law. That assumption is doing more work than it looks.

Hosted store builders ship gift cards as a fixed feature with fixed behaviour. Squarespace's own support documentation, for example, states that customers cannot enter a custom value on a gift card, that only the preset amounts you create are available, and that partially used gift cards cannot be refunded. If your treatments are €47.50 and your presets are €50 and €100, that gap is not a preference you can adjust. It is the product.

WordPress works the other way around, and this is the practical case for running a business site on a platform that keeps its ecosystem open rather than curated. Gift card extensions in the WordPress plugin directory and the WooCommerce marketplace cover scheduled delivery on a future date, per-code transaction logs, and balance reports across issued, redeemed and expired codes. The official WooCommerce Gift Cards extension pairs with a name-your-price extension when you want the customer to choose the amount.

None of that is exotic. It is the difference between configuring a voucher that fits your prices and accepting one that fits somebody else's assumptions, which is the whole argument in why managed WordPress does not have to mean a walled garden.

You will still connect your own payment processor, exactly as you would for any other payment taken directly on your own website. The hosting platform's job is to make sure the checkout that processes it is fast, patched and standing up on the days it matters, which is what Web60's all-inclusive hosting at €60 a year is built around: full WordPress on Irish infrastructure, with the plugin ecosystem intact.

One honest exception. If you sell nothing else online, want three fixed-value vouchers and nothing more, and have no appetite for maintaining anything, a hosted builder's built-in gift card genuinely is less to look after. No extension to choose, no updates, no decisions. The moment your prices stop matching the presets, or you want to sell anything alongside the vouchers, that simplicity turns into a ceiling.

The Night It Actually Matters

Vouchers concentrate. A business can sell more of them in the fortnight before Christmas than in the previous nine months combined, and every one of those sales is a checkout, not a cached page. Cached pages are cheap to serve. Checkouts are not, because they bypass the page cache by design, hit the database, and take an outside payment call with them.

Consider a typical case, and this pattern repeats every December. A cookery school in Roscommon sells vouchers for its weekend classes, and the bulk of them go through the site in the last ten days of the year. The voucher is the gift. There is no parcel, no card in the post, nothing else to hand over on the day. When the confirmation email does not arrive, somebody opens an envelope on Christmas morning with nothing in it, and the first the business hears about it is a phone call from a customer who is now embarrassed in front of their family.

I will admit an operational lesson of our own here. On an early deployment we verified that a voucher extension worked, watched a test code generate correctly, and signed it off. What we had not verified was that the confirmation email actually landed in an inbox outside the server. It did not. Now the test is not "did a code generate", it is "did a code arrive somewhere we do not control".

The second failure mode is quieter. A digital voucher is a string of characters in an email, and email forwards. Codes get screenshotted, shared in a family group chat, and presented twice in good faith by two different people who each believe it is theirs.

Which brings the honest limitation. No website can stop a code being copied. What a properly configured system can do is refuse the second redemption, show the balance at zero, and give you a timestamped log of when the first one happened so the conversation at the counter is a factual one rather than an argument. Detection, not prevention. Know the difference before you need it.

The operational answer to both is unglamorous and it is the same answer as for any other revenue-critical function on your site. Test the purchase path in a staging environment rather than on production. Verify that emails leave the building. Take a backup before you deploy a change to anything in the checkout, so a rollback is a decision rather than a rescue.

Putting Vouchers on Your Site in Five Steps

Decide what the voucher can buy. This one sentence sets your VAT treatment, so write it deliberately rather than copying a competitor's wording.

Configure the expiry first. Five years or none, and nothing in between. Do this before you take a single sale, because the terms attach at the moment of purchase.

Verify in staging. Buy a voucher, redeem half of it, confirm the balance survives, and confirm the email reaches an address on a different provider entirely.

Deploy, then buy one yourself. Push to production, purchase a real voucher with a real card, walk it through redemption, and refund yourself. Ten minutes, and it is the only test that proves the payment leg works.

Reconcile monthly. Pull the outstanding balance across live codes and hand that figure to your accountant. It is a liability sitting on your books, not money already earned.

Conclusion

Gift vouchers are one of the better things a small business can sell. The customer pays now, the obligation lands later, and the person who eventually walks in is somebody who might never have found you otherwise.

They are also a promise with a statutory shelf life, recorded by whatever system you sold them through. The rules themselves are short, and setting them correctly takes one screen and one afternoon. What makes them expensive is discovering the defaults were wrong in December, or the year after that, when somebody arrives holding a voucher and expecting you to honour it.

Check the four settings against your own site this week, while nothing is riding on the answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does a gift voucher have to be valid for in Ireland?

At least five years from the date of purchase, under section 66B(1) of the Consumer Protection Act 2007 as amended by the Consumer Protection (Gift Vouchers) Act 2019. Your other lawful option is to issue vouchers with no expiry date at all. If your terms specify anything shorter, the contract is deemed to carry a five-year expiry regardless, and that deemed term overrides what you wrote. The rules apply to vouchers sold on or after 2 December 2019.

Do I have to let a customer spend a gift voucher across more than one visit?

You cannot include a term requiring the full value to be redeemed in a single transaction. In practical terms your system needs to hold a running balance against the code rather than cancelling it on first use. If your terms do block the leftover from being used later and the remaining balance is €1 or more, the Act deems your contract to require you to reimburse that balance in cash, by electronic transfer, or as a replacement voucher carrying the same value and an expiry no earlier than the original.

When do I pay VAT on a gift voucher I sell?

It depends on the classification. Revenue treats a single-purpose voucher, where the place of supply and the VAT rate are both known at issue, as taxable in the period the voucher is sold. A multi-purpose voucher, which is anything that can be spent across different VAT rates, is taxable in the period it is redeemed. That distinction decides whether the VAT on a strong December leaves you in the next return or waits until the customer books in. Confirm your own classification with your accountant.

What happens if a customer never uses their gift voucher?

For a single-purpose voucher, Revenue's guidance states that no adjustment can be made in respect of non-redemption, so the VAT you accounted for on sale stays accounted for. Where a multi-purpose voucher is never redeemed, no VAT is due at all. Separately from tax, an unredeemed voucher is a liability on your books until it expires or is honoured, which is why the outstanding balance is worth reviewing monthly rather than annually.

Can I sell gift vouchers without running a full online shop?

Yes. A voucher is a digital product with no stock, no shipping and no delivery address, so the setup is considerably lighter than a full catalogue. You need a product page, a payment processor connected to your site, an extension that issues and tracks codes, and a confirmation email. Many businesses run vouchers as the only thing they sell online and keep everything else offline.

Do these rules apply to loyalty cards and promotional discount codes?

Generally not. The Act specifically excludes vouchers supplied under a customer loyalty scheme, promotional vouchers tied to specified goods or services for a limited period not exceeding three months, refund vouchers issued for returned goods, electronic money, and instruments redeemable only against utilities or telecoms. Those five-year obligations target vouchers sold or made available to be given as a gift. If you run both a loyalty scheme and gift vouchers, treat them as separate products with separate terms.

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