Question re: Selling Gift Cards in Store & Online

[SecretChocolate]

Losing too much time digging through vendors so I'll posit a question here--

We're going to give ShopifyPOS a run along side our long standing Shopify website. I've manually made most of the gift cards over the years but was thinking of changing that to something a bit more, not me. From what I can tell do all app vendors that do 'gift cards' not use Shopify's baked in Gift Card product? Are there any? Do any of them tie into the POS well?

[RobertCo]

Hey - Is this still an issue? We use both Shopify Online & POS and use gift cards (both physical and digital) which are useable online and in-store so I'm sure I could answer this but I'm not 100% sure exactly what you're asking / trying to achieve. 

For our physical gift cards, we have created a design our selves and have a printer that produces them with a QR code / serial number. When they're sold, the QR code is scanned at the POS to 'sell' the gift card and then it can be redeemed in-store using the QR code at the POS or the customer can use the serial number online.

[SecretChocolate]

I was more looking for a card management system that encapsulated both online and POS. The app vendors seem to create their own product and do their own redemption so if you leave a vendor you basically have a system that fails. Currently I generate each gift card online and send it out personally after talking to the buyer--it's really too much overhead for me so I was looking for a solution that used the native system, if it exists. Does that explain the overall issue better?

For your physical cards, how are you allocating and loading the cards? I could see doing some serialized QR generation but I'm not sure how that would tie back into the system and get loaded at checkout..

[RobertCo · Accepted solution]

Re the physical cards, we pre-generate a bunch of serial numbers which are printed on the cards with an associated QR code of the serial number.

- If the physical card is sold in-store, we scan the QR code to sell the gift card.

- If the physical card is sold online, we grab one of the cards and type the serial number into the Issue gift cards section of the Shopify admin to activate it with the value before posting out to the customer.

With Digital Gift Cards we use the Online Store 2.0 gift card feature online to allow the customer to choose a recipient email / recipient name / message and these are automatically fulfilled / emailed off (so not touched by the dispatch team).