Google Partners With Israel’s Rise.ai To Help Businesses Offer Digital Gift Cards

Google selected Israeli startup Rise.ai, the developer of AI-powered customer re-engagement solutions like gift cards, loyalty cards, rewards, and refunds, to help businesses offer digital gift cards through their public listing on Google My Business (GMB.)

The agreement with Google aims to help Rise.ai enable small and medium businesses to “survive and even thrive during the COVID-19 crisis and beyond,” Rise.ai said in a statement.

Through the integration, businesses can add a “Buy Gift Card” support link to their Google business page. The gift card option will appear every time a customer looks a participating business on Google Search.

“Since COVID-19 started to affect the market, we see tremendous need for advanced digital gift cards and store credit solutions like the one we are offering on Google My Business platforms,” said Yair Miron, CEO and founder of Rise.ai. “The fact that Rise.ai was selected by Google as a partner for offering digital gift cards is one the strongest votes of confidence that our solution can get, and will allow us to help unprecedented number of small and medium businesses.”

Founded in 2015, Rise.ai uses artificial intelligence to empower brands with an automated branded currency solution for gift cards, rewards, store credit, and incentives, which the company describes as a “currency of their own.” Rise.ai helps merchants retain customers and increase their average spending.Powered by artificial intelligence, Rise.ai helps merchants retain customers, increase retention and revenue, and drive new customers to the store.

Last year, Rise.ai conducted independent research of more than 3,000 businesses to uncover current behaviors regarding gift cards and store credit during the COVID-19 crisis.

In June, Rise.ai made its services available for purchase on Facebook and Facebook-owned Instagram in a new partnership with the tech giant. The new feature will allow small-and-medium-sized businesses (SMBs/SMEs) to sell digital gift cards to their local community through Facebook and Instagram, using customers’ geo-location.

According to a recent survey by the Connected Commerce Council in cooperation with Google, small businesses without a pre-existing e-commerce presence were twice as likely (31 percent vs. 15 percent) to have temporarily stopped operating during the COVID-19 crisis.

Small businesses that were using e-commerce tools pre-crisis are 5.5x (11 percent vs. 2 percent) more likely to project increased revenue in 2020 compared to 2019, according to the company Seventy percent of those surveyed reported that digital tools were helpful, with fully 30 percent saying that they were essential during the ongoing crisis.