Incentive providers tend to blend together. Most promise gift cards, fast delivery, and “seamless integration.” On paper, they look interchangeable. In practice, the differences show up where it matters most: in how your participants experience the reward, and in how much operational overhead lands back on your team.
If you’re evaluating providers — or reconsidering the one you have — these are five areas worth examining closely.
1. Recipient experience, not just delivery
The easiest thing to measure is whether a reward was sent. The harder (and more important) question is whether it was used.
Rewards are the primary reason most people participate in studies — in a recent Giftbee study of Australian research participants, 71% ranked the reward in their top two motivations. But sending a gift card doesn’t mean the job is done. Two-thirds of participants in that same study reported problems: rewards that were hard to find, arrived as an unexpected brand, or simply expired before they got around to using them.
Look for a provider that designs the experience around the recipient, not just the sender. That means a modern, intuitive interface, clear communication, and minimal friction between receiving a reward and actually spending it. If participants need to create accounts, navigate clunky portals, or print PDFs, that’s a signal.
2. Flexibility and choice
A $10 gift card for a brand someone never shops at isn’t really worth $10 — at least not to them. Perceived value matters as much as face value, and choice is the simplest way to close that gap.
The best providers let recipients swap to a brand they actually want, from a broad catalogue. In Australia, look for 200+ brands; internationally, the strongest platforms offer thousands. Beyond brand choice, features like partial spend (use some now, save the rest) and the ability to combine smaller rewards into a meaningful balance make a real difference — especially for active panellists earning frequent, modest amounts.
Some platforms also offer physical options like prepaid cards or merchandise alongside digital gift cards. That kind of range means you can match the incentive format to the audience, not the other way around.
3. Transparency and tracking — for both sides
Participants shouldn’t need to resort to saving emails, taking screenshots, or keeping handwritten notes to track their rewards. (Yet our research found 73% do exactly that.) And your team shouldn’t need to field “where’s my gift card?” support requests that a better platform would prevent.
On the participant side, look for clear balance visibility, redemption history, and timely notifications. On your side, look for real-time tracking and analytics — not just delivery confirmations, but insight into redemption rates and outstanding balances. This data helps you understand whether your incentive strategy is actually working, and gives you evidence to back up budget decisions.
A useful litmus test: does the provider make it easy for participants to see everything they’ve earned in one place? If the answer is no, expect higher support costs and lower satisfaction.
4. Operational fit and scalability
An incentive provider might tick every box on the participant experience side, but if it creates manual work for your operations team, the partnership won’t last.
Key questions to ask:
- Admin portal and oversight. Does the platform give you a centralised view across your entire program? You should be able to manage floats, monitor activity, and respond to participant queries through a single, intuitive back office — not a patchwork of spreadsheets and email threads.
- Multi-currency and cross-border. If your panels span multiple markets, look for centralised float management across currencies and the ability to run multiple programs within one account — including cross-border.
- Integration. Does the platform offer API access that connects with your chosen panel management solution? Manual CSV uploads work at small scale, but they don’t survive contact with a growing panel.
- Bulk capability. Can you send thousands of rewards in a single order without the platform breaking a sweat?
- Delivery flexibility. Some teams want the provider to send rewards directly on their behalf. Others prefer unique links they can distribute through their own channels. The right provider supports both models.
- User administration. Role-based permissions let you control who can do what — essential once your team scales beyond one person managing incentives.
The goal is a provider that disappears into your workflow rather than adding steps to it.
5. Designed for redemption, not breakage
This one is subtler, but worth thinking about. Some incentive platforms are structured so that unredeemed value — breakage — is a meaningful part of their business model. When that’s the case, the platform may not be strongly motivated to make redemption easy, obvious, or enjoyable.
That doesn’t make them bad actors. But it does mean their commercial incentives and your research goals might not be perfectly aligned. You want participants to feel rewarded, to come back, and to trust the process. A provider whose margins improve when people don’t use their rewards has a different optimisation target.
Look for providers that actively design to minimise breakage and maximise redemption. Features like balance reminders, no recipient fees, no expiry on stored balances, and the ability to give unused balance to someone else in Australia are good signals that the provider is focused on recipients actually getting value from the reward.
Where Giftbee fits
We built Giftbee around the idea that incentives should actually get used — not collect dust in inboxes. That means recipient choice from 200+ Australian brands (and thousands internationally), no expiry on Giftbee balances, partial spend, the ability to combine and even gift balances to others in Australia, and no fees for recipients.
For research teams, our admin portal provides full oversight of your program — centralised float management across multiple currencies, the ability to run multiple programs within one account including cross-border, and role-based user permissions. Add real-time analytics, API integration with your panel management solution, bulk sending at scale, and flexible delivery — we can send on your behalf or provide unique links for your own distribution. We also offer physical prepaid eftpos cards and merchandise through prepaideftpos.com.au when digital isn’t the right fit.
The short version: we’ve tried to build the provider we’d want to work with if we were running a panel ourselves.
Exploring options? Get in touch — we’re happy to walk through how Giftbee works for research teams, no pressure.