Gift cards

A gift card is money, not a discount: a balance in your shop's currency that its holder spends at the checkout, over as many orders as it takes. Gift cards come with every plan, Free included, and have a page of their own: Gift cards in the sidebar, right below Discounts.

Creating a gift card

Create gift card asks for:

• the amount, at most 100'000
• the recipient's name and email, both optional
• a note only you see, for example where you sold the card

The card gets a random code of 16 letters and digits in groups of four, such as K7MX-Q2PD-9RTF-W4HN, without 0, O, 1 or I, which are easy to mix up. It is valid for five years to the day; a shop seated in Austria or Liechtenstein issues gift cards without an end date.

Nothing is sent: the new card opens, Copy code puts its code on your clipboard to pass on, and Gift card as PDF opens it as a card to print or to send by email, with your logo, the value and the code. Cards your customers buy in the shop come from a gift card product and stand in the same list. The link in the line under the page's title opens a new product with Gift card already chosen.

The list

The list shows each card with the last four characters of its code, the amount it was issued for, the balance left, the recipient, the day it is valid until and its status:

• Valid: it can pay
• Used up: nothing is left on it
• Expired: its end date has passed; you can extend it
• Deactivated: you switched it off
• Refunded: sold in the shop and taken back with its purchase, by a credit note or a cancellation, before anybody used it; it cannot pay any more

Above the list, three tiles add up the cards the filters let through: Open balance, what the valid cards are still worth, which is what you owe your customers; Issued, what all of them but the refunded ones were worth when issued; and Valid gift cards.

The filter bar searches the code, the recipient, the note and the number of the order that sold the card, and filters by status. The search, the filters and the rows per page are remembered for the next visit. Export writes every card the filters let through to a CSV file, with the full codes and the number of the order that sold each one.

A gift card's page

A click on a card opens it: the full code with Copy code beside it, the balance next to the amount it was issued for, and every booking on it — issued, redeemed in an order (with a link to the order), released again because that order was cancelled, booked back by a credit note, taken back with the purchase that sold it, and what you booked by hand.

A card sold in the shop also names, under Sold with order, the order it was bought with, linked; under Gift card email, when its email went out and to whom, or the day it goes out; and the buyer's Message with the gift. A refunded card keeps its page as it was, and nothing on it changes any more: no booking by hand, no new end date, no switching off.

Under Book an amount by hand you record what happened outside the shop: Deduct for a purchase paid with the card at a market or in your store, with a note such as "Bern market", or Book back to correct a wrong deduction, never beyond the card's original amount.

Under Validity, Extend moves the end date to a later day, and Remove expiry date makes the card valid without one, after asking, since a card without an end date never gets one back. A gift card can be extended but never shortened, and an expired card stays in the list and can be extended like any other.

Deactivate stops a card at the checkout at once, for example when it was lost and you issued a new one; Activate again undoes it. The balance stays as it is either way.

Gift card as PDF opens the card to print, the same one a sold card's email carries; see Gift card products. A deactivated or refunded card has none.

At the checkout

The customer types the code into the summary, in the same field as a discount code, with or without its dashes. An order takes one gift card, and a discount code may come with it.

The card pays after the VAT, like money. The order's total and its VAT stay as they are; the card takes what it holds, up to the total, and the customer pays the rest with one of your payment methods. The summary shows the card's part under the total, what is left to pay and what stays on the card for the next order. A card that covers the whole order needs no payment: the order is placed as paid.

When the rest would be less than the smallest card payment (0.50 in CHF or EUR), the card pays that much less and keeps the difference: a 10.20 order with a 10.00 card asks for 0.50 and leaves 0.30 on the card. The rule is the same whatever the customer pays with.

An order paid online holds the card's part for 30 minutes while the customer pays, and gives it back if the payment is cancelled or never made. An order paid by invoice or in cash takes it at once.

The checkout refuses a card that has expired, is used up, is deactivated, was refunded or is in another currency than your shop's, and tells the customer so. Subscriptions cannot be paid with a gift card, and neither can the gift cards an order buys.

Invoice, emails and order page

• The invoice shows the full total as always, then "Gift card …1234" with what the card paid, and the remaining amount. A Swiss QR-bill asks for the remaining amount only.
• The order confirmation and your new-order email show the same two lines.
• The order page shows the card in its summary, linked to the card, and the order history notes what the card paid. The orders list has a Gift card field for its views.
• A credit note on such an order puts the card's part back onto the card first and refunds only the rest as money. See Credit notes.