How to Create a Gift Card Product

OVERVIEW

Gift cards are a useful feature that allows you to generate more awareness of your store and more sales at the same time though personal referrals by your customers.  A gift card can be purchased by a customer as a "gift" to allow another (hopefully new) customer to come back to your store and complete one or more purchases.

REQUIREMENTS

The following pre-requisites will be necessary to accomplish the goals of this article:

• Basic understanding of products
• Store administrator access

GETTING STARTED

Adding a gift card product is done nearly the same way as any other product in your store catalog.  The process is amazingly simple and the differences are outlined in the instructions below.

CREATING A GIFT CARD PRODUCT

Before you create any gift card products, you should first enable and configure gift cards.  You'll find Gift Card Settings in the Admin menu as shown below.

The Gift Card Settings view allows you to configure the high-level settings for how gift cards will work in your store.  An example of how the settings might look for you are shown below.

Setting	Default Value	Description
Enable Gift Cards in Checkout	Unchecked	If checked, gift cards can be used as a form of payment during the checkout process. Otherwise, Gift cards can only be sold and not redeemed.
Expiration Period	12	Enter the number of months that you wish to allow gift cards to be valid for.
Gift Card Number Format	GIFTXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX	The format field allows you to define exactly how you want the gift card numbers to be generated for customers that will be using them.  It is ideal to have a prefix of some kind and some separators, such as hyphens as shown in the default example.  If you change this value at some point, it will only impact new gift cards as they are sold.
Format Will Use Letters and Numbers	Unchecked	If checked, letters will be used in addition to numbers to generate your gift card numbers. If you use both letters and numbers, your gift card format will be much more secure against nefarious users/programs that might try to guess gift card numbers.
Min Amount	1	This is the minimum amount that you allow a gift card to be sold for.
Max Amount	500	This is the maximum value that a gift card can be sold for.
Predefined Amounts	25,50,100,250,500	Gift cards can be sold in pre-defined amounts.  Enter each amount here, separated by commas.  For example, if you only wanted to sell gift cards in $25, $50 and $100 cards, you would put 25,50,100 in this field.
Capture Mode	Check Full Amount at Checkout	If desired, you can determine whether a gift card is debited right away during purchase by charging the full amount, or if you want to authorize the amount first and debit it later as part of your fulfillment process.  This works the same way as credit cards.
Gateway	Hotcakes	Gift cards can have other providers created for it, just like custom payment gateways. If you have another provider installed, you would be able to select it here.

A gift card begins the same way as any other product.  However, once you choose the gift card product style, it will expose new options for you to manage.  Therefore the first step will be to go into your store administration and click to create a new product from the Products view as shown below.

Fill out the available fields on this initial view and click the Save button at the bottom of the product.  That's all there is to it!  You can now begin selling and redeeming gift cards!