What is Google Play Gift Card?
Receiving a gift gives us an out of the world happiness and especially when it’s from a loved one! Yes, you may not be able to express it well, but deep down it does makes us happy. Be it a birthday gift from a friend or a special anniversary gift from our spouse, or just a bunch of flowers for no reason just to make your day, gifts do have a different vibe that may not be summed into words.
In the same way, as we’ve become so much obsessed with online shopping and applications, marketers have found new ways to make us happy. Yes, that’s right! So, have you ever heard of Google Play Gift Card yet? Wondering what to do with it? In this post, we will be covering how to use Google Play Gift Card and what all benefits you can avail from it. But first, let’s understand what Google Play Gift Card is and how can you send Google Play Gift Cards online to your friends and family.
What is Google Play Gift Card?
Did anyone just send you Google Play Gift Card? Well, first you have all the reasons to feel happy about it. Just how its name implies, Google Play Gift Card allows you to buy applications, music, movies and other digital content on Play Store for free. You can think it of as a cashback card with which you can buy your favorite content from Play Store and enjoy these services on your Smartphone.
Another advantage of using Google Play Gift Cards is that whichever digital content you’ll buy online will be accessible across all your Android device where you can find all your favorite applications and services in one place.
So, if someone just gifted you a Google Play Gift Card, you’ve got all the reasons to thank them! Now without wasting any further minute, let’s explore how to use Google Play Gift Card.
How to Redeem Google Play Gift Card?
The process of redeeming a Google Play Gift Card is pretty simple!
How to Redeem Gift Card Online:
- Navigate to play.google.com/store from a web browser.
- Click on Redeem near the bottom left corner (or just go to play.google.com/redeem).
- Enter your 16-digit code in the popup.
- Tap Redeem.
- Then hit Confirm to add the balance to your Google account.
Redeem Gift Cards While Making a Purchase
And finally, you can also redeem a Google Play gift card on the go while you’re trying to make a purchase. If you realize you don’t have enough funds you don’t have to back out and start over, you can do it from the purchase or checkout screen.
- Make a purchase on Google Play for an app, movie, music, etc.
- Before you tap the buy button hit the ^ arrow near the right side of the menu (as shown below)
- Tap on Change Payment Options and select Redeem
- Enter your 16-digit code like usual, hit Redeem, then Confirm the balance
How to Redeem Google Play Gift Cards on a Phone or Tablet
- Open the Google Play Store app Google Play from your home screen or app tray.
- Tap Menu Menu near the top left and scroll down to Redeem.
- Enter your 16-digit code.
- Tap Redeem.
- Then hit Confirm to add the balance to your Google account.
Gifting on Google Play: What you need to know
We’ve talked about how Google was missing the ability to gift content before, and there’s a little good news on that front: you can now gift books through Google Play. Now there’s a bit of bad news, too: you can’t buy Google Play gift cards on the Google Play app anymore. If you want to add credit to your Google Play balance, you’ll need to go hunt one down at a brick and mortar store or answer some Google Opinion Rewards.
The ability to buy gift cards on Google Play’s app and website has vanished recently, followed shortly by an update of Google Play Support to show that you can’t buy the gift cards digitally anymore, you have to buy a physical card, and that you can gift Google Play Books and Google Play Music All Access.
We’re not sure what prompted the change, but for parents who top off their kids’ Google Play accounts through gift cards or those who found Google Play credit to be an easy last-minute gift, you’re going to want to head to a retailer that stocks them and grab a few.
So now, you now have to use three different methods to gift three different kinds of Google Play content:
- To give Google Play credit, you have to go to a store that sells the physical gift cards.
- To give a Google Play Book, you have to find the book on the Google Play site or app and tap Gift.
- To give a Google Play Music All Access subscription, you have to open the Google Play Music app, open Settings and tap Send gift.
And here is what we now cannot gift through Google Play:
- Movies and TV shows
- Music albums and individual songs
- Magazine and newspaper subscriptions
- Apps and games
We can only hope that gifting books is the test balloon before being rolled out to the rest of the content in the Google Play Store, but that’s anyone’s guess, at this rate. What isn’t a guess is how much of a pain removing digital gift cards is going to be.
