Gift card products

A gift card product sells gift cards in your shop. The buyer picks an amount, the card arrives by email — to them, or straight to the person it is for on the day they choose — and whoever holds its code pays with it at your checkout. Every card it sells is a gift card like the ones you create by hand under Gift cards, with the same balance, the same list and the same rules at the checkout.

Gift card products come with every plan, Free included, and count towards the five products of Free like any other product.

Creating one

Products → Add Product, and under Product Type choose Gift card. The form then leaves out what a gift card does not have: stock, sizes, a parcel, shipping, costs and a compare-at price. The link under the title of the Gift cards page opens the same form with Gift card already chosen.

• The variants are the Amounts: each amount is a variant buyers can choose, and Add amount adds the next one. A variant is named after its amount ("50 CHF") until you give it a name of your own; the cart, the order and the invoice print that name beside the product's.
• Allow an amount of their own lets buyers enter an amount besides yours, between At least and At most (100'000 at the most).
• The tax category is always the multi-purpose voucher: a gift card is sold without VAT, and the VAT is due on what it pays for when it is redeemed.

Name, description, pictures and category work as for any product. The AI writes a gift card's texts and pictures as a gift card, never as goods: no material, size or shipping in the text, and a picture shows a blank card with no amount and no code on it.

What your customers see

On the product page, instead of a variant dropdown:

• the amounts as buttons, and "Other amount" for an amount of their own, with the range under the field
• a box "Email it to the recipient". Ticked, it asks for the recipient's name, their email address, a message and a day to send it on, today at the earliest and a year ahead at the latest; without a day the card goes out right after the payment. Left unticked, the card goes to the buyer's own email address after the payment, to forward or to print.

There is no quantity stepper: each click puts one gift card in the cart, and the cart shows the person and the day under it. Two cards for two people are two lines. Cards in product grids and lists show no cart button for a gift card, and a gift card on a wishlist has no "Move to cart", because only its product page asks whom it is for.

At the checkout

• A gift card is sold without VAT; the invoice says why under the line.
• Discount codes, volume discounts and the free-shipping threshold leave gift cards out: a code takes its share of the goods only.
• A gift card does not pay for the gift cards in an order. A customer who pays with one pays the gift cards they buy with another method.
• An order of gift cards alone needs no delivery address and no shipping; the customer gives their invoice address as always. Every payment method you offer is open to it, invoice and cash included.

After the payment

Once the order is paid, each card it bought is issued with a code of its own, valid for five years (without an end date for a shop seated in Austria or Liechtenstein), and appears in the list under Gift cards. An online payment issues them at once; an order paid by invoice or in cash once you set its payment to paid, or the payment import books it.

The card's email goes out in your shop's name and language, with the code, the value, the last valid day, the buyer's message, a link to your shop and the card to print attached as a PDF (see below):

• to the recipient the buyer named, early in the morning of the day they chose, or right after the payment when they chose no day
• to the buyer, right after the payment, when they named nobody

The order confirmation names under each such card whom it goes to and on which day. A gift card is delivered by its email and never shipped: once its cards exist, its line counts as fulfilled, so an order of gift cards alone does not wait among the orders to ship.

The card to print

Every gift card also comes as a card to print: a PDF of half an A4 sheet in landscape (A5), in your design's colours and with your logo. It shows the value, the last valid day, the code, whom the card is for and from whom, the buyer's message and your shop's address to redeem it at. Its email carries the PDF as an attachment; whoever wants the card on paper prints it themselves.

Gift card as PDF opens the same card for you: on the order page beside each card under Gift cards sold, and on every card's page under Gift cards, including the cards you create by hand. A refunded or deactivated card has no card to print.

In the customer account

A customer with an account at your shop finds a "Gift cards" tab there as soon as they have a card:

• their own cards, each with what is left on it, the last valid day and its status: a card they bought for themselves, one emailed to them as a present, and one you created by hand for their email address
• the cards they gave, with whom each one is for and whether its email has gone out or on which day it will, but not what the recipient has spent of it

The account shows only the last four characters of a code; the full code is on the card and in its email. A present appears in the recipient's account once its email has gone out to that account's address, never before the day the buyer chose.

On the order page

Gift cards sold lists the cards the order sold: the end of each code with a link to the card, its status, its value, whom it is for, the buyer's message, and its email — when it went out, or the day it goes out. Gift card as PDF opens its card to print; Send now sends an email that never got out; Send again sends it once more, for example when the recipient cannot find it — at most three times in 24 hours and ten minutes apart. Until the order is paid, the section says that the cards follow the payment. The order history notes every card issued, every email sent and every card taken back.

Refunds

A gift card can be taken back only while nobody has used it. In Issue a credit note, the order's cards stand under Gift cards from this order: tick the cards you take back, and their price is refunded as money with the credit note. The ticked cards stop working at once, and their status becomes Refunded. A card that has been used, even in part, cannot be ticked and stays valid. The credit note covers at least the ticked cards and never the price of a card you do not take back.

Cancelling the order, or refunding it in full in your Stripe dashboard, takes back every unused card of it as well. Should the refund fail, the cards are valid again.

Feeds and search engines

The Google Shopping and Meta feeds leave gift cards out, as they do subscriptions: neither platform has a place for a product without goods. Your shop's /llms.txt lists a gift card as one, without a price, since the buyer picks the amount.