At every charity we've helped run an online raffle, the same question surfaces within the first week of ticket sales: can someone buy tickets for another person?
The answer in most raffle platforms is no, or technically yes but with caveats nobody wants to deal with. The buyer's name goes on the ticket. The buyer's name goes in the draw. If the elderly supporter you bought tickets for happens to win, the prize letter goes to your address. The recipient never gets a confirmation email because the platform doesn't know they exist.
This sounds like a small UX gap. It isn't. For charity raffles specifically, gift ticket purchasing is the difference between supporters who can participate and supporters who get left out.
TLDR. Most online raffle platforms tie one ticket to one buyer account. Charity supporters frequently want to buy tickets for elderly relatives, employees, or family members. Without proper gift ticket support, charities lose participation from the people who need it most. The fix is a checkout flow that captures recipient details per ticket and treats the recipient (not the buyer) as the entrant.
What gift ticket purchasing actually means
In most software, "gift purchase" means buying multiple of the same thing and labelling the order with someone else's address. That's not what charity raffle organizers mean.
Real gift ticket purchasing for raffles has four parts:
- The buyer enters checkout with their own payment details.
- For each ticket in the cart, they specify a separate recipient: name, email, optional message.
- The recipient receives a confirmation email with their ticket number and a personal note.
- The recipient's name (not the buyer's) goes into the draw.
Why charity raffles especially need this
Other categories of raffle work fine without gift purchasing. A pub running a meat draw doesn't need it. An office Secret Santa pool doesn't need it. A subreddit running a giveaway doesn't need it.
Charity raffles are different because the supporter base often includes people who can't or won't buy online themselves. Four real patterns we've seen across hundreds of charity raffle setups:
Family members buying for elderly relatives. A daughter buys five raffle tickets and wants her mother's name on them. Her mother doesn't have an email address, has never used a credit card online, and lives 200 miles away. Without gift purchasing, the daughter ends up calling the charity office to ask if they can manually enter her mother's name in a spreadsheet. Most charities say yes. None of them want to.
Corporate sponsors buying for staff. A local business buys 50 tickets as a perk for employees during a charity gala. Each employee should get their own ticket entry, not 50 tickets all entered under the company name. If the company wins, that's awkward. If individual employees win, that's a story.
Parents buying for children. A parent buys tickets for their twin children's school PTA raffle. Each child gets their own ticket, their own number, and ideally their own little PDF certificate they can take to school the next day.
Group buys for friends. Five friends pool money for a raffle, but only one of them has the time to actually go through checkout. Five names should still appear in the draw. The buyer pays once and everyone gets credited.
In each case, the technical capability is the same: separate buyer from recipient at the ticket level. The charity capability is more important: serve supporters who have money to give but limitations on how they can give it.
The hidden revenue impact
Gift purchasing isn't a feature that makes existing customers happier. It unlocks a different kind of buyer entirely.
We don't have public statistics on this, but anecdotally, organizations that turn on gift purchasing partway through a campaign see a measurable bump in ticket sales over the following weeks. The pattern: existing supporters realize they can buy on behalf of relatives and friends, those secondary networks come into the raffle who otherwise wouldn't have seen it, and the average tickets-per-buyer goes up.
A few specific patterns that make sense once you see them:
- A retired couple who would never have bought a ticket each separately end up with eight tickets between them because their adult children bought tickets for both of them.
- A small business owner who would have bought one ticket as a token of support buys 20 to distribute as employee perks.
- A church congregation member who can't navigate the website at all ends up with five tickets purchased on their behalf by the parish secretary.
Why most platforms don't have it
The default assumption baked into most ecommerce software is that the buyer is the user. Stripe's data model expects a customer record per buyer. WooCommerce's order model assumes one billing address, one shipping address, and one customer for the whole order. Most raffle plugins inherit those assumptions and never reconsider them.
To support gift purchasing properly, a raffle plugin needs to:
- Add custom fields to each line item in the cart (recipient name, email, message).
- Persist those fields through the checkout flow.
- Survive the WooCommerce cart-to-order transition without losing per-item data.
- Generate ticket records keyed on the recipient, not the buyer.
- Send recipient emails using the WooCommerce email system but with the recipient's email address as the destination.
- Update reporting and analytics so "tickets sold by buyer" and "tickets entered by recipient" are both visible.
The plugins that do support gift purchasing tend to either gate it behind their paid tier or hide it in a buried setting. Worth checking when evaluating any raffle platform.
What good gift ticket UX looks like
Two raffle plugins can both claim to support gift purchasing and ship completely different experiences. If you're choosing between options, here's what to look for.
Per-ticket recipient details, not per-order. If you buy three tickets, the form should let you specify three separate recipients. A platform that asks for "shipping address" and treats the whole order as a single gift fails this test.
Block Checkout and Classic Checkout support. WooCommerce's Block Checkout is the modern default. If gift fields only work in Classic Checkout, half your customers won't see them.
Dynamic add and remove. When the customer changes the ticket quantity in the cart, the recipient fields should add or remove automatically. Forcing the customer to refresh or restart breaks the flow.
Recipient gets a real email. The recipient should receive a properly formatted confirmation, not an SMTP relay that lands in their spam folder. Use the WooCommerce email system so existing branding and templates apply.
Recipient name in the draw. When the raffle is drawn, the recipient's name (not the buyer's) should appear in the winner notification, the audit log, and any public winner announcement.
Personal message field. Optional, but adds a lot to the gift experience. Helpful for "Happy birthday from Mom" or "Good luck from the team."
Privacy-aware. Gift recipient data is personal data. The plugin should respect WordPress privacy tools, support data export and erasure under GDPR, and not leak recipient details to the buyer's order email.
In our Raffle for WooCommerce plugin, all of the above ship in the free version because we built it specifically with charity raffles in mind.
Compliance: who is the actual entrant?
For charity raffles subject to regulatory oversight, gift purchasing changes who counts as the entrant for legal purposes. This matters in three places.
Eligibility checks. Some jurisdictions require entrants to be local residents, of legal age, or members of a specific community. The eligibility check applies to the recipient, not the buyer. A platform that records only the buyer's details can't prove eligibility.
Skill-testing questions in Canada. Under Canada's Criminal Code, raffles often need a skill-testing element. The recipient should answer the question, not the buyer. If the buyer answers on behalf of the recipient, the legal classification gets murky. The cleanest implementation has the recipient confirm the answer when they receive their ticket email.
Free entry routes in the UK. UK lottery law requires a free entry route alongside paid tickets. The free route is for the entrant, not the buyer. A buyer who's already paying for tickets can also gift a free entry to a recipient who would otherwise be excluded.
For the underlying legal framework across the US, UK, and Canada, our charity raffle online guide covers each jurisdiction in detail.
Setting it up with WooCommerce
If you're already running WooCommerce, the technical setup is short. The full walkthrough is in the gift purchases documentation, but the high-level steps are:
- Install Raffle for WooCommerce from the WordPress.org plugin directory. It's free.
- In WooCommerce > Settings > Raffle > General, check Enable Gift Purchase.
- Decide whether gift purchasing should be on for all raffles globally or per-product. The per-product toggle is useful if some of your raffles are members-only or single-buyer formats.
- Configure the Gift Received email under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails. The default template is fine for most cases, but you'll likely want to add your charity branding.
- Test the flow end-to-end before going live. Buy a ticket as yourself, then buy a ticket as a gift to a separate test email address. Confirm both emails arrive correctly and both names appear in the admin ticket list.
If you don't yet have a raffle plugin and want to compare options first, our hands-on comparison of every WooCommerce raffle plugin goes through which ones support gift purchasing and which don't.
Frequently asked questions
Can someone buy raffle tickets for another person on most platforms?
Not natively. Most WooCommerce raffle plugins treat the buyer's WordPress account as the entrant. A few support gift purchasing as a paid feature. Our Raffle for WooCommerce plugin includes it free in the WordPress.org version. SaaS raffle platforms like RallyUp and GalaBid have varying levels of support, often gated behind higher tiers.
Does the recipient need a WordPress account to receive a gift ticket?
No. Gift purchasing should work for recipients who have no relationship to the website at all. The recipient's email becomes the contact for the ticket, and they receive a confirmation with their ticket number and any personal message. They don't need to log in, register, or take any action to be entered.
What happens if a gift recipient wins?
The winner notification email goes to the recipient, not the buyer. The audit log records the recipient's name and email as the winner. If the prize requires shipping or pickup, the recipient is the contact. The buyer is referenced in the order metadata for accounting, but they aren't part of the winner workflow.
Can the buyer see whether their gift recipient won?
This depends on the platform's privacy model. The buyer can see their own order and which tickets they purchased. Whether they can see the winner status of a gift ticket depends on the plugin's design. In our setup, the buyer sees their order details but not the recipient's personal post-purchase activity, which respects the recipient's privacy.
Is gift purchasing GDPR-compliant?
It can be, if the platform handles recipient data carefully. The recipient's name and email are personal data and should be subject to the same privacy controls as any other customer data, including data export, data erasure, and lawful basis for processing. The buyer providing the data acts as the consenting party, but the recipient retains rights over their own data once it's stored.
Does gift purchasing work with WooCommerce Subscriptions?
For one-off raffle purchases, gift purchasing works as expected. For subscription-based raffles (where a customer buys recurring tickets), the gift relationship usually applies only to the initial purchase. Subscriptions of recurring gifts to the same recipient are technically possible but rarely useful for raffles specifically.
Can a recipient transfer their ticket to someone else?
Most raffle platforms don't allow ticket transfers between recipients, mainly because it would create compliance complications around eligibility and audit trails. If a recipient can't or doesn't want to participate, the buyer would need to contact the charity to request a refund or a manual reassignment.
What to do if you're a charity organizer
The rough order of operations is straightforward:
- Decide whether your raffle audience includes supporters who can't or don't want to buy online directly. If yes, gift purchasing is essential. If no, it's optional.
- If you're choosing a raffle platform, evaluate gift purchasing against the criteria above. Per-ticket recipients, Block Checkout support, recipient emails, recipient name in the draw.
- If you're already running on a platform without gift purchasing, look at whether the feature is available as an upgrade or whether switching platforms is the cleaner path.
- Set the feature up before your campaign launches, not after. Adding it mid-campaign creates inconsistent ticket data that's painful to clean up at draw time.
The point isn't that gift purchasing is technically complicated. It isn't. The point is that platform choice locks you into a default assumption about who's allowed to participate. For charity raffles, that assumption matters more than the price, more than the templates, more than most of the features that get listed at the top of comparison tables.
