While various investment techniques such as cryptocurrency and stock trading are being widely used, gift-tech, a combination of gifticon and investment technique, has been gaining much attention nowadays for its efficiency.
Gifticon is a service where one purchases a certain product that can be delivered or a coupon that can be exchanged at franchises and presents it in the form of a digital message. Goods vary in range from coffee coupons to high-end brand products.
The gifticon market has been showing continuous growth. According to Statistics Korea, the turnover of E-coupon services marked a 16.8 percent increase, roughly amounting to 700 billion won as of January 2023, in comparison to January 2022.
Professor Kyungja Kim from the Department of Spatial Design and Consumer Studies at the Catholic University of Korea further explained that the emergence of digital platforms has affected such growth.
“Just like exchanging cash, gifts, or vouchers at offline stores, the development of digital platforms provided users with various ways to communicate online,” Kim said. “Gifticons are especially more frequently used since they can be conveniently kept on mobile devices, easily transferred to others, and hold unlimited amount of money.”
Kim described that the recent economic crisis brought by COVID-19 and inflation also led to such trend. She elaborated how it is natural for people to seek ways to spend more frugally when the economy goes through a crisis.
On the other hand, when it comes to Millennials and Generation Z, who are mostly digital natives, Kim stated that a gift-tech trend is recognized as a way of showing off their capabilities of thriftiness or even as a sort of leisure.
When prospecting the future of the gifticon market, Kim mentioned that regardless of the economic rise and fall, it will keep on expanding, leading to bringing in a more diversified range of products.
“Thanks to its convenience compared to exchanging physical commodities, it can even be replaced with cash someday,” Kim said. “However, if gifticons are issued in a prepaid card method and are no longer spent in a way where people interchange gifticons with designated products, a concept of gift- tech would become meaningless as it would function exactly the same as cash.”
Along with the ascending interest towards gifticons, applications where people can freely sell unused gifticons or buy secondhand gifticons at discounted prices are often used as well.
Regarding the actual usage experience of secondhand gifticon applications, Yang Jin-young, a DL E&C Associate at Soongsil University who also runs a YouTube channel sharing financial management advice, provided his insights as a frequent user of such applications.
So far, Yang has made over 600 transactions only on a single application, selling over 5.5 million won worth of gifticons and buying more than 670,000 won worth of them. Mostly making purchases for coffee, movie tickets, or products at convenience stores, the biggest advantage he finds in this method is that in the process of purchasing a certain product, he can easily save money.
“A tall-sized Americano at Starbucks is sold at 3,750 won on secondhand gifticon applications, which is 760 won cheaper compared to the original price,” Yang said. “For someone who goes to Starbucks every day, one can save up to 22,800 won a month, and 277,400 won a year, which results in a greater saving.”
Yang also makes additional income by reselling extra gifticons he receives on birthdays or anniversaries, as he can simply upload them on the applications to monetize them.
“Although it may look trivial now, getting a 20 to 30 percent discount on every payment can bring a bigger reduction in the long run,” Yang said. “I would keep saving my spending through this since I find this the most efficient way to spend the asset I own.”