Feature Request: Check Gift Card Balance

[ShawnBouchard]

Good day! I've put in the request via email and phone, but wanted to rally the forum to maybe submit your own feature requests. With a brick and mortar store, customers that received a gift card as a gift want to know what the balance is before shopping. Which results in them standing in line, then asking what their balance is. Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this. There is no "check balance" button. 

So we've resorted to adding a $10,000 product, available on POS only, then you add it to the cart, scan the payment gift card, see what the Gift Card WOULD pay for, then delete the cart and advise the customer. 

But this regularly results in the customer seeing $10,000 on the customer view screen and being confused. What a feature to lack...

[Rae]

Hi, @ShawnBouchard! 

Rae from Shopify here. 

Thank you for reaching out with this feature request. I can definitely understand how it would be helpful to have a way to check gift card balances on our POS, so I would be glad to pass this feedback over to our developers so that they can read over your thoughts too. 

We’re always looking to improve our platform, so we really appreciate you taking the time to submit this feedback. Hopefully our teams can look into building a feature that allows for this in the future. If our teams add this feature in, it will be announced in our changelog and also on our Announcements page. 

In the meantime though, the best way to check these balances is directly in your Shopify admin by clicking on ‘Products > Gift Cards’ and selecting the card in question. On this screen, the balance remaining on the card will be displayed. For the specific steps to find this information, check out this help doc. 

If a gift card is associated with a customer’s account, the customer can also check their gift card balance using the link in the email they received at the time of purchasing the card. Check out more information on this here.  

Let me know if you have any other feature requests, or if you have any questions or concerns, and I would be glad to help further. 

[NDtricia]

We too would LOVE to have the ability to check gift certificate balances in the POS app!

[Rae]

Hi, @NDtricia and @ShawnBouchard! 

Thank you for expressing your interest in this feature, @NDtricia, and welcome to the Shopify Community. 

I wanted to reach out to both yourself, and @ShawnBouchard, to let you know that it's now possible to check the remaining balance of gift cards from directly within the POS app.

To do this, please follow these steps: 

1. Open the POS app and select the 'Orders'  tab. 
2. Search for the order number where the gift card was originally purchased, and then tap on this order to open it. 
3. Select the gift card from inside the order. 
4. A window will display which outlines the remaining balance left on the card. The window will look similar to this:

Additionally, if you ever need to replace a gift card that has been lost or stolen, please make sure to disable the original gift card by following these steps. Then, reissue a new gift card with the remaining balance by completing these steps. 

If you have any questions or concerns about this process, feel free to reach back out to me here for further assistance. 

[NDtricia]

Thanks for trying but the people who have the gift card won't know the
purchase number.

[ShawnBouchard]

I agree completely. Wth Shopify. So this is how you expect this to go down:

Me: customer enters store

Customer: Hi, I recieved a gift card for Christmas, can you tell me the balance?

Me: sure what's the order #?

Customer: .....

Edit to add:

To Shopify developers, when is the last time you were in a store trying to spend a gift card and you had to know the receipt number for your gift card??? Did that happen to you at Cineplex? How about home sense? Last time you went through a. Drive through and used a gift card, did you give them the receipt # from the person that bought it for you so you could check the balance? Wtf

[Rae]

Hi, @NDtricia and @ShawnBouchard. 

Thank you both for your feedback.

I understand this is an important feature for both of your businesses, so I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us. I will pass this feedback over to our developers so they're aware of how this is impacting you, and how the current feature could be improved. 

In the meantime, as a workaround, I recommend writing the order number directly on the back of the physical gift cards that you sell before giving them to your customers. That way, when a customer needs to check the balance on their gift card, the order number is already written on the back of the card and can be easily located and entered into the POS to help determine the remaining balance. 

Please let me know if there's anything else I can assist with. 

[TylerKing]

It would be nice if there was a web portal where they could check the balance. I understand they can follow the link on the email, however usually the customer who purchased the gift card isn't the one uses it or gets the email to see the balance, especially in a retail gift card situation. This would be a massively useful feature as a location that sells a lot of physical gift cards.

[Rae]

Hi, @TylerKing!

Thank you for reaching out with this suggestion. I can see how this would be a helpful addition for customers and retail merchants, so I'll add this piece of feedback to the list I've shared with our developers. 

In the meantime, if any other Community members would like to add their interest in this feature with our teams, please reply to me here with your .myshopify.com URL and I will add your feedback to our list. 

Thanks! 

[ShawnBouchard]

braeheidgardens.myshopify.com

[einardo]

I second this. We need to be able to let the clients check their current balance.

Yes it can be done by adding the gift card to Apple Wallet, and yes it can be done at checkout - not very intuitive though.

contexo.myshopify.com etc. etc.

[JM_Korrupt]

Agreed. This should be a basic feature -- it's "Gift Card 101". Please make it so, the entire experience needs to be CUSTOMER centric.

korruptlabel.myshopify.com

[Roman89]

dresses-boutique.myshopify.com

[Bryce8]

Hi,

I think having the ability to check gift card balances easily would be wonderful. Also the ability to view the cash opening, closing, and adds to the till each day on reports would be incredible.

Thank you for this consideration!

[Kokonuty]

Yes I ran into this problem yesterday.  The associate couldn't check it on POS app so I took it to the admin to check on the computer.  Associates don't have admin rights and wouldn't be able to check it if I was not around at the time.

[AmandaPGD]

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@Kokonuty wrote:

Yes I ran into this problem yesterday.  The associate couldn't check it on POS app so I took it to the admin to check on the computer.  Associates don't have admin rights and wouldn't be able to check it if I was not around at the time.

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Agreed.  There seems to be a lot of "basic" retail features that only admins can do - it makes it very difficult for regular sales staff to be able to assist customers using only the POS station.

pgrahamdunn.myshopify.com

[SpencerCran]

One more vote for checking the gift card balance in-store. It is a pretty basic retail feature.

[Jewelcam]

agreed we need this feature ASAP

[Andrea_Georgi]

+1 for allowing customers to check their own gift card balance via web portal!

the-citizenry.myshopify.com

[RikkiLeighG]

So, it's been almost a year since this issue with gift card services and I don't see where anything has been resolved.  The new version of POS still doesn't seem to adress the gift card balance problem.  Should we hope for an update soon or do I need to start shopping around for a POS system again that can do this for us?