With Christmas day looming, retailers that issue digital gift cards, along with the vendors that supply them, are expecting a rush of last-minute purchases from shoppers who don’t have time to buy plastic cards. With e-cards flying out to the handsets of recipients at parties and in homes and offices, “phones will be vibrating all over the country,” predicts Tom Niedbalski, senior vice president of business development at Transaction Wireless Inc., a San Diego-based e-gift card platform supplier.

Indeed, Niedbalski says the Christmas season, as important as it is for gift card sales generally, throws into relief what has turned into a year-long boom for digital cards. He says more than 40% of online gift card sales for client merchants are now for e-cards that can be delivered via e-mail or mobile text message. “There’s definitely a major trend,” he says. Beyond this year, 2012 will be even bigger, he forecasts. 2008 and 2009 were “wait-and-see” years for retailers, he says, and now more and more of them are adopting non-plastic gift card options. “They’re done waiting,” Niebalski says. “2012 is definitely going to be a huge, huge increase over 2011.” Transaction Wireless, he adds, already has a full plate of implementations set for the first quarter.

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