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Selling Gift Cards on your website
Selling Gift Cards on your website
Jon Patch avatar
Written by Jon Patch
Updated this week

Feature Overview

Offset now offers an add-on Gift Card feature that allows your customers to purchase digital Gift Cards directly from your website.

Setup requires an additional page to be added by to your website by the Offset team, which is customizable and configurable by you in our CMS. This page can be added to your site for a $500 fee.

Please reach out to [email protected] for any questions or if you would like to add a Gift Card page to your site.

Gift Card Page Functionality

The Gift Card page contains a number of unique features such as:

  • Three default price options (configurable) as well as a custom amount field

  • A unique cart / checkout experience that allows for a recipient name and email address to be entered

  • A modal for recipients to check the remaining value of their Gift Card

  • A Gift Card code email, which is sent to the recipient

Note that Gift Cards and other products can't be purchased together. Since the cart and checkout for Gift Cards is unique, buying a Gift Card clears any other products that might be in the cart.

Gift Card Site Placement Options

Because the Gift Card page has a unique checkout flow, you won't want to place the Gift Card product (as seen in Offset) on your site the way you would other products you sell on your site.

Instead, the Gift Card page will be added to your site and you can link to that page from various places, according to your preferences for how you would like to market them to visitors.

Here are the following location options that are supported for the Gift Card page links:

  1. Configurable by you in the CMS:

    1. Homepage banner

    2. Homepage popup

    3. In the customer account page (toggle this when you launch)

  2. Configurable by the Offset team:

    1. In your dropdown navigation menu

    2. In your footer

    3. A promotional bar in the middle of your filter shop results (only available for sites with a shop + product filter page)

Emails

Upon a customer purchasing a Gift Card from your website, two emails are generated:

  1. A standard receipt email (send to the purchaser)

  2. A new Gift Card code email (send to the recipient, see below)

Other Options For Delivering Gift Cards

If the purchaser of the Gift Card doesn't wish to send an automated email to their recipient (ie: they want to share their Gift in a different fashion,) they may choose to enter their own email address as the recipient when purchasing a Gift Card online. This will ensure they receive the receipt AND the Gift Card code email.

From there, the purchaser could share the Gift Card code with their recipient through different means, such as writing the recipient a personalized email and including the code, writing the code on a physical object or card they then gift to the recipient, etc.

Placing Admin Orders for Gift Cards on Behalf of Your Customers

If you or your staff would like to help your customers send Gift Cards to their recipients, we recommend logging in as the purchaser to your own site, and placing their orders using the same Gift Card page.

To sign in as your customer on your own site, navigate to the customer's page in Offset, click the "Actions" button, and select "Sign In as Customer on Website."

Note: while Offset provides certain global tools for Gift Cards, we don't recommend adding a Gift Card product to an admin order because the standard admin checkout flow isn't currently optimized for them.

It is technically possible to sell a Gift Card to a customer by adding a Gift Card product to an admin order, and you wouldn't need to add a Gift Card page to your website to do this, but it's a bit awkward.

The following pieces of Gift Card functionality that are available the front-end page are missing from the admin checkout flow:

  • The ability for the purchaser to select someone else as the recipient and input that person's email address

  • The ability for a Gift Card code email to be sent to the recipient (no such email is sent to the purchaser either)

  • The ability to choose between one of three price options (although you can edit the product price to whatever you wish in admin checkout)

Selling a Gift Card in an admin order will result in a Gift Card Code being generated, but you'll need to share the code with the purchaser manually, and they would need to forward it somehow to their recipient.

Accessing and Redeeming Gift Cards

Offset doesn't require a Gift Card be redeemed by a recipient that was selected initially, meaning anyone who the Gift Card code has been shared with can redeem it.

For example: if your customer emailed a Gift Card to their uncle, the uncle could forward the email to his wife, she could create an account on your site and apply the Gift Card code to her order.

For this reason, it's important to keep Gift Card codes discrete and organized, especially for customers that are purchasing multiple Gift Cards.

Other Important Details

  • The Gift Card cart / check experience is unique, and additional products cannot be added to the cart alongside Gift Cards

  • The Gift Card value range that is supported by default is $25-$2,500

  • A customer must have an account in order to purchase Gift Cards, or make a purchase with a Gift Card

  • New customers who use a Gift Card are currently still required to add a credit card to their account in the checkout flow, even if their balance is fully covered by the Gift Card

  • Gift Cards can be applied to allocation orders, but not wish requests

  • Gift Cards can be redeemed by anyone who has access to the Gift Card code

  • Gift Card funds do not expire

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