How can customers easily check their gift card balance?

Retail & Point of Sale

Topic summary

Retail merchants using Shopify POS lack a straightforward way for customers to check gift card balances in-store. Currently, staff must either:

Workarounds mentioned:

  • Add a dummy $10,000 product to the cart, scan the gift card to see what it would cover, then delete the cart (confusing for customers)
  • Look up the original purchase order number in POS (impractical, as customers rarely have this information)
  • Check balances through the Shopify admin panel (not customer-facing)
  • Scan gift card QR codes via POS home screen (recent addition)

Key frustrations:

  • Customers must wait in line just to ask staff for their balance
  • Unlike standard retail practice, there’s no self-service balance check option
  • Gift cards cannot be reloaded, adding to customer dissatisfaction
  • No web portal exists for balance inquiries independent of purchase confirmation emails

Status:
Shopify representatives acknowledged the feedback and forwarded requests to developers multiple times over several years. The issue remains unresolved, with merchants expressing ongoing frustration that such basic functionality is missing. One customer even struggled to check their own gift card balance, highlighting the gap between merchant and end-user experience.

Summarized with AI on October 28. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
31

I would like to add my voice to those others asking for what seems like a basic POS function. It would be a big help and make for a better customer and employee experience to have a simple feature of checking the gift card balance. Our retail staff don’t have access to the backend, as some others have mentioned, which makes one of the workarounds impossible.

It’s great that these issues are being brought to the product team, but increasingly we’ve been pushing up against limitations to Shopify POS with no viable workaround and no planned solution (e.g. standalone customer returns, disabling quick sale in POS, merge customer profiles, etc.). It’s disappointing and results in more time spent fixing errors.

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