Selling gift cards

In Marketing → Gift cards, you sell gift cards in your shop, create some for your customers and track their balance. Your customers buy them on a dedicated page, give them by email and spend them in one go or several. Gift cards are included in every plan.

Turning sales on

1. Connect Stripe in Settings → Payments: a gift card is paid online.
2. Open Marketing → Gift cards and turn on ‘Sell gift cards in the shop’.
3. In the ‘Amounts offered’ card, add the amounts your customers can choose, up to 8, for example €25, €50 and €100. Turn on ‘Let customers choose the amount’ to add a free field, between a ‘Minimum’ and a ‘Maximum’. Each amount ranges from 1 to 1,000 in your shop's main currency.
4. Save. The status changes to ‘On sale in your shop’.

As long as the status shows ‘Online payment not connected’ or ‘No amount offered’, the purchase page sells nothing.

Validity period and image

In ‘Validity period’, choose how long a card stays usable after purchase: 12, 24 or 36 months. The choice applies to cards issued from then on; cards already issued keep their expiry date. Depending on your business's country, the law may set a minimum period or forbid any expiry date: the page then says so and applies the rule by itself.

The ‘Card image’ appears on the purchase page and in the email. Without an image, the page shows a card in your theme's colours.

Linking to your gift cards from your menu

The purchase page has its own address, but nothing leads to it until you add it to your menu. Once sales are on, the Gift cards page tells you: ‘No menu link leads to this page’. Click ‘Add to the header’ or ‘Add to the footer’: the link is added, with its label in all 8 languages, and appears in your shop after about a minute.

• ‘View page’ opens the purchase page in a new tab.
• To move or rename the link, open Settings → Menus. You can also create it there: ‘Add a link’, then the link type ‘Gift cards’.
• On the homepage, a banner button or the button of an ‘Image with text’ section can lead there too: in Settings → Customise, give the button the destination ‘Gift cards’.

What your customer sees

On the ‘Give a gift card’ page, your customer chooses an amount, then ‘As a gift’ or ‘For me’. As a gift, they enter the recipient's first name and email, a message if they wish and, if needed, a send date: the card goes out that day at 8 am, your shop's time, up to a year ahead. They pay online, to your Stripe account.

• The recipient receives the card by email, with its 16-character code and a link to a printable version. The buyer receives the code too.
• You get an email for every card sold.
• The same page lets anyone check a card's balance with its code (the ‘Check a card’s balance’ part).

Paying with a gift card

At checkout, your customer enters the code in the ‘Gift card’ field and clicks ‘Apply’. The amount taken from the card is shown, and the rest is paid by bank card. If the card covers the whole order, they confirm it with no other payment. A card can be used in one go or several, until its balance runs out or it expires.

• A card is used in your shop's main currency: a customer paying in another currency is asked to switch back to it.
• Express checkout (Apple Pay, Google Pay) does not take gift cards: a customer who has one uses the regular checkout.
• If the amount left to pay would be too small for a bank card payment, the card is not accepted on that order.
• An order created by hand in the admin cannot be paid with a gift card.

Creating a card by hand

‘Create a card’ is for an in-store sale, a goodwill gesture or a contest. Enter the amount and, if you like, the recipient's name and email, a message and an ‘Internal note’, visible only in the admin. Tick ‘Email the card to the recipient’ so they receive it straight away.

The full code is shown only once, right after creation: copy it or click ‘Print the card’. After that, the admin only shows its last 4 characters, and a lost card is resent by email.

Tracking and managing cards

At the top of the page, ‘Outstanding balance’ shows what your customers can still spend, next to ‘Active cards’ and ‘Sold this month’. The ‘Issued cards’ list can be filtered by status (Active, Used up, Expired, Deactivated, Cancelled) and searched by code, email or name. ‘Export’ downloads it as a CSV file.

Click a card to see its balance, expiry date and history. You can then:

• ‘Resend email’: the card is sent again straight away, even if it was scheduled for later.
• ‘Deactivate’: the card can no longer be used until you click ‘Reactivate’.
• ‘Cancel and refund’: for a card bought online and never used, the card is cancelled and its buyer refunded to their payment method.

Refunds and invoices

• Selling a card does not produce an invoice: the invoice is issued for the order paid with it, for its full amount, with the card shown as a payment method.
• An order refund is split between the gift card, which is credited back, and the bank card, in proportion to what each paid. A card credited back stays usable for at least 30 days.
• A cancelled or abandoned order gives back to the card what it had taken.
• An order paid partly by gift card cannot be edited and does not get a payment link.

Stopping sales

Turn off ‘Sell gift cards in the shop’: the page stops selling, but cards already issued stay usable until they expire, and the page keeps the balance check. Once no card can be used any more, the page closes: your shop then hides the menu links and homepage buttons that lead to it by itself, and shows them again as soon as you resume sales. Settings → Menus and the homepage editor point this out under the link or button concerned.