Solved

Can Shopify accommodate reloadable gift cards for charitable donations?

petgrocer
Trailblazer
215 2 327

We have so many people that need to use reloadable gift cards. Any work arounds for this? We collect donation for a charity where people round up their purchase (another feature that would be nice to have on Shopify, rounding for Canada, round up option, and store credit option) but for now we are trying to put it on a gift card. Is there an option so people don't end up with 100 tiny gift card amounts that we have to manually scan QR codes for? 

Accepted Solution (1)

petgrocer
Trailblazer
215 2 327

This is an accepted solution.

For people reading this - the clunky work around we ended up using:

 

We bought physical gift cards, and now on the POS you CAN NOT SELL receipt paper only gift cards, you MUST sell physical gift cards. The only way around this is if you grant your staff access (or are in store and can do it yourself 7 days a week open to close) to going into the setting on the POS, and change the payment types manually, do the one transaction by turning off physical gift cards, then after your transaction going back in and turning physical gifts cards back on.

 

To stop this ridiculous situation, we keep physical gift cards turned on, and have a separate excel spreadsheet with our own custom gift card numbers. With the physical gift card you can select to enter your own number rather than scan in the qr code, and we do that and then print a copy of the receipt. We also have set up the reloadable cards by adding one letter to the end of the code on the customer's existing card. Our client base is not comfortable with wasted plastic via new gift cards every time, and I'm not comfortable with the money grab from Shopify by trying to force us to buy more and more expensive plastic cards. I hesitated to even post this as I don't want them to take away that functionality. Since they aren't fixing other things that make them direct profit that are problematic and would both make a happy end user (stores) and bring in more money to them, I think this is a low probability and am risking sharing the work around.

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Replies 7 (7)

HKJ
Trailblazer
145 4 44

Not really, afaik. In theory each time someone earns a new gc, you could disable the previous gc and issue the new one for the combined amounts, but the system does not allow $ to be added to an existing gc.

Neomi_av
Shopify Partner
197 2 17

Hi @petgrocer, I'm Neomi from the Rise.ai app,

We specialized in gift cards & loyalty store credit solutions.

Our loyalty card seems to be a good fit for your needs.

The loyalty accumulates all of the customers' gift cards, rewards and refunds.

You can read more here

Checkout our listing page, and feel free to contact me at info@rise.ai

petgrocer
Trailblazer
215 2 327

@Neomi_av 

Thanks for the comments. We looked at Rise as a potential work around to many of the missing features for POS users and it would help with two of them. However, the price is way beyond what a small business can afford to pay for something that should be included out of the box. I already pay for Shopify online, then I pay for the Shopify POS, then I pay pay pay for apps. This app was one I was willing to add to the many extra paid ones required to bring this POS up to somewhat functional operation for us. I can not pay $200 USD (and then also get charged HST in USD!) for an app that will give us two functions that I expected would be included in our already high monthly fees to Shopify. If you change the format to be affordable for smaller end users we would revisit it.

clbetzler
Tourist
7 0 6

Hello -

 

How are you accepting donation rounds ups using shopify? We have been trying to do this!

 

Emily

petgrocer
Trailblazer
215 2 327
No, we have not been able to do the round up donations. Shopify does not
have any option for this. We even tried to use the tipping feature but that
also doesn't work. Right now we have our staff manually do the math and
then manually type in 'donation' as a custom sale item, and I run a report
each week (that ALSO requires a strange work around) to find out what
amount was donated. It's very clunky.

petgrocer
Trailblazer
215 2 327

This is an accepted solution.

For people reading this - the clunky work around we ended up using:

 

We bought physical gift cards, and now on the POS you CAN NOT SELL receipt paper only gift cards, you MUST sell physical gift cards. The only way around this is if you grant your staff access (or are in store and can do it yourself 7 days a week open to close) to going into the setting on the POS, and change the payment types manually, do the one transaction by turning off physical gift cards, then after your transaction going back in and turning physical gifts cards back on.

 

To stop this ridiculous situation, we keep physical gift cards turned on, and have a separate excel spreadsheet with our own custom gift card numbers. With the physical gift card you can select to enter your own number rather than scan in the qr code, and we do that and then print a copy of the receipt. We also have set up the reloadable cards by adding one letter to the end of the code on the customer's existing card. Our client base is not comfortable with wasted plastic via new gift cards every time, and I'm not comfortable with the money grab from Shopify by trying to force us to buy more and more expensive plastic cards. I hesitated to even post this as I don't want them to take away that functionality. Since they aren't fixing other things that make them direct profit that are problematic and would both make a happy end user (stores) and bring in more money to them, I think this is a low probability and am risking sharing the work around.

AdrianExpert
Shopify Partner
28 1 1

Hi Guys,

 

There is an app which allows to reload a gift cards now!! There is a Top ups section where you can adjust a balance for a gift card!

 

https://apps.shopify.com/gift-card-hero

 

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