This would have been nicer had it launched about 3 weeks ago. Square-wallet gift cards would be great easy holiday gifts.<p>(it also seemed like an obvious feature ever since Square launched. Running loyalty and gift cards is one of the ways to get out of the 1-2% gross margin ghetto for just processing visa/mc, which is one of the big problems with a payments startup. Even if you process hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions, it's hard to make enough from the fraction of a percent left over after variable costs to cover your fixed costs, let alone turn a profit. Yet, even on day one, you need huge scale and high reliability.)
Gift cards as generally implemented today are awful. You pay for something now that often doesn't get used for a long time. In lots of cases gift cards don't get used at all. IIRC it's something like 25% of the time. It might be a bit less with digital cards that you can't lose, but it'll still be significant. It's disappointing that Square's offering doesn't adress this core deficiency.