Live From the Motivation Show: Circuit City Latest Merchant to Offer Gift Certificate Center Cards

Don’t know whether to get your assistant a PDA or DVD player for Christmas? Let him or her choose from more than 5,000 electronic products at any of 609 Circuit City Superstores, or from 400,000 items at http://www.circuitcity.com.

Thanks to an agreement signed earlier this month, Circuit City customers can purchase gift cards and gift certificates through Gift Certificate Center. A division of Hallmark, the Minneapolis-based GCC plays intermediary between merchants and multi-location companies that use the GCC online incentive program. It provides custom printing of plastic and paper gift cards or certificates via a proprietary just-in-time technology. It also builds and maintains custom online sites for its corporate reward programs.

“[This] allows Circuit City to increase the availability of its gift cards,” said Fiona Dias, senior VP and president of Circuit City Direct, in a statement. GCC has similar agreements with some 400 other retailers, catalogs, restaurants and travel providers. According to Heather Teskey, VP marketing and customer relations, the company will have signed 18 new retailers in calendar 2004 by the end of December.

“We’re very excited about our agreement with Circuit City,” Teskey said. “Gift certificates are a growing market in which we’ve seen double-digit growth in just the past two years.”