How to add a gift shop to your app

Adding a gift shop to your app does not mean linking out to an external retail wishlist or emailing a gift card code. It means embedding a browsable catalog of real physical products directly inside your product, under your brand, so one of your users can buy something tangible for another user without ever leaving your experience. The gifting provider handles the catalog, payments, fulfillment, and shipping. You earn a commission on every completed sale.

If you have decided in-app gifting is the right feature for your platform and you want to know what the integration actually looks like, this post walks through the three paths, what you get out of the box, and how long each one takes to go live.

The three integration paths

RealGifts supports three ways to embed a gift shop in your app. The right choice depends on how much control you need over the UI and how tightly the gifting feature needs to connect to your platform's own logic.

Path 1: JavaScript embed (fastest)

Three lines of HTML and the shop is live. You drop a script tag on the page, supply your API key, and RealGifts renders the white-labeled shop inside a container you specify. Styling is configured from your dashboard.

Choose this path when you want to ship quickly and the hosted shop UI is close enough to your design system. It works on any HTML surface and requires no backend changes.

<script src="https://cdn.getrealgifts.com/sdk/v2/embed.min.js"  data-container="rg-gift-shop" data-key="YOUR_API_KEY"></script>

Path 2: Native SDK

SDKs are available for JavaScript, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, iOS, and Android. The SDK gives you more control over how the shop renders and how it passes identity and session context from your own auth system. You call into the SDK from your own code, manage the container and layout yourself, and surface whatever catalog views fit your UX.

Choose this path when you need deeper integration with your app's navigation, auth, or design system, and you want to avoid iframe constraints.

Path 3: REST API

The full API gives you complete control. You call RealGifts endpoints directly, build your own storefront UI on top of the catalog and fulfillment infrastructure, and handle the purchase and redemption flow however your product requires. All the backend work (catalog management, payment processing, fulfillment, support) still lives with RealGifts.

Choose this path when you need maximum flexibility: a fully custom gift UI, event-driven gift triggers, or tight integration with your platform's commerce layer. It is the highest-effort path and the most flexible.

What you get out of the box

Regardless of which path you choose, RealGifts handles the infrastructure behind every transaction. Here is what that includes.

Catalog. Over 1 million products across hundreds of brands, maintained and updated by RealGifts. You do not manage vendor relationships or catalog updates. From your dashboard, you configure which categories and price ranges are visible to your users.

Cart and checkout. The purchase flow, including cart management and checkout confirmation, is part of the platform. On the embed and SDK paths, this ships with no front-end work on your side.

Payment processing. RealGifts handles the transaction. Your users pay at checkout; you receive a commission on each completed sale. You never touch payment credentials or PCI scope.

Fulfillment and shipping. After a purchase, RealGifts picks, packs, and ships the order to the recipient's address. The recipient provides their address at redemption, so neither you nor the sender needs to collect or store it.

Customer support. Delivery issues, damaged items, and address corrections are handled by RealGifts' support team. Your engineering and operations staff are not in the loop on individual orders.

The short version: you embed the shop, configure the catalog, and earn commissions. You do not manage a warehouse, a carrier account, or a support queue.

The revenue model

You earn a commission on every gift sold through your embedded shop. The commission rate and the point at which the monthly subscription fee is waived depend on your plan and your monthly sales volume. At qualifying thresholds, the platform fee is offset entirely by the commissions your users generate. See the pricing page for the exact numbers by plan.

The practical effect is that in-app gifting can become a net-positive line item once your platform reaches transaction volume, not just a feature cost.

How long does the integration take

The JavaScript embed can be live in an afternoon. If your app has an HTML surface and you have your API key from the dashboard, the setup is literally the three-line script tag above plus dashboard configuration for your catalog and branding. A developer using this path can have a working shop the same day.

An SDK integration typically takes a sprint or two, depending on how custom the UI needs to be. The SDK gives you language-native control over the shop's behavior, which means more design and development decisions to make. The complexity is in the customization, not the SDK itself.

The REST API path is the most open-ended. If you are building a fully custom gift storefront on top of RealGifts' catalog and fulfillment, the timeline depends on your product requirements. The embed and SDK paths are the most common starting points, with teams migrating to the API layer later if the product demands it.

Who this is for (and who it is not for)

This integration path is designed for platform builders: developers and product managers embedding gifting capability into their own product. The users of the gift shop are your users, transacting inside your platform, under your brand.

It is not designed for HR or marketing teams who want to send outbound gifts to contacts, prospects, or employees from a portal. That is a different product category with a different workflow. If your use case is "we want to send appreciation gifts to our client list," you are looking for a corporate gifting tool, not a white-label shop to embed in an app.

If your use case is "we want our users to be able to send real gifts to each other inside our platform," or "we want to reward users with physical gifts based on in-app events," this is the right infrastructure. For more on the verticals where embedded gifting drives the most value, see the solutions pages for dating apps, gaming platforms, and enterprise and HR platforms.

Getting started

The 14-day free trial includes full Starter access, your API key, and complete developer documentation from day one. No credit card required to start, and no sales call to schedule before you can make your first API call.

Sign up, drop the embed script into a test page, and you can have a live gift shop with a real catalog running in your development environment within the hour. From there you can evaluate the SDK and API paths, configure catalog filters and branding, and run a complete purchase through the redemption flow before you commit to a plan.

Developer documentation, SDK references, and integration guides are all available at the developer docs. If your platform is a subscription product, the patterns for adding gifting to subscription apps cover renewal milestones, churn deflection, and achievement triggers specifically.