Starbucks is offering an easy way to share the gifts with friends on various occasions. Launched today, January 26, the all-new Starbucks Card eGift program provides digital-savvy consumers with an opportunity to send their family and friends a greeting card, which serves as a traditional off-line Starbucks card for purchasing beverage, food or merchandise within the chain or/and earning My Starbucks Rewards benefits.

It comes as an extension of the highly successful Starbucks Cards program—only in 2010, the retailer’s clients loaded more than $1.5 billion onto their Starbucks cards, and it’s 21 percent more than the year before,—and Starbucks Mobile Payments debuted in late October 2010 in the US.  Starbucks Card eGifts can be personalized by writing the recipient’s name and a special message of up to 160 characters and scheduled for one of the upcoming occasions (for example, St. Valentine’s Day—so far, there are four themed cards available) or sent just as an expression of gratitude. Users can use they PayPal account or credit card to ‘charge’ these eGifts with an amount of $5.00—$100.00.

The digital card can be delivered either to an email or a Facebook account (in the bottom of the order form users can see a list of their FB friends). To make the whole process yet more convenient for the one who sends the gift, Starbucks Card eGifts also allows viewing upcoming birthdays of Facebook contacts. The brand recently launched Starbucks Card Facebook app with a similar purpose, but the Card eGift is obviously much bigger.