Gift cards

A gift card is stored value: you issue a card worth ₪200, the customer gets a code, and they spend that ₪200 across one order or several. You may call it a gift voucher, a store credit, or a gift certificate. They are all the same thing here.

Brainerce issues gift cards, tracks their balances, shows you what you still owe, and lets customers redeem them at checkout. This section covers all of it.

Gift cards are still in rollout

There is no Gift cards entry in your sidebar yet. The feature is built and the articles below describe it accurately, but it has not been opened to stores. You cannot reach the screen from your dashboard today. It appears in the Marketing group, next to Coupons and Discount rules, when the rollout reaches your store.

Two more things are true the moment it does arrive:

• Gift cards start switched off for every store. They stay off until you turn them on, because stored value carries accounting and consumer-law duties that are yours, not ours. See Turn on gift cards.
• Your website still has to show the redemption box. Brainerce accepts a gift card at checkout, but the field a customer types the code into is part of your storefront, and someone has to build it. See a feature you turned on is not showing on your website.

Customers cannot buy a gift card on your website

This is the biggest gap and it surprises everyone, so it is worth being blunt about it.

There is no gift-card product. A shopper cannot add a ₪200 gift voucher to their cart, pay for it, and have a code arrive in their inbox. There is no gift-card product type in the product editor, no "sell a gift card" setting, and no storefront page for it.

Every gift card is issued by you, by hand, from the dashboard. You type an amount and a reason, and Brainerce mints the code. That makes gift cards a tool for service recovery, goodwill, staff credit, an in-person voucher sale you took payment for some other way, or a promotion you run yourself. It is not yet a way to sell gift cards online.

If you list a product called "Gift Card" in your catalog and take money for it, nothing is minted automatically. You would still have to open the gift cards screen afterwards and issue a card by hand for every order.

A gift card is a means of payment, not a discount

This is the difference that causes the most confusion, and it is why gift cards sit beside Coupons in the menu rather than inside it.

So a ₪500 order paid with a ₪200 gift card is still a ₪500 order, with tax on ₪500, and the customer pays the remaining ₪300 by card. You have not given a ₪200 discount. You have collected ₪200 earlier, and you are settling the debt now.

A customer can use a coupon and a gift card on the same order. The coupon reduces the total first, then the gift card pays against what is left.

What works today

• Issue a card by hand for any amount, with a reason recorded permanently. See Issue a gift card.
• Email the code to a recipient automatically, if you enter their address when you issue it.
• Adjust a balance up or down, with a required reason that stays on the record forever.
• Disable a card and turn it back on, one at a time or in bulk.
• Re-issue a card when a customer loses their code. The balance moves to a brand new code and the old one stops working. See When a customer loses their gift card code.
• See your outstanding liability, the figure your accountant asks for at month end, with a CSV export of the cards behind it. See Gift card liability.
• Customers redeem at checkout, paying part or all of an order. See How a customer redeems a gift card.

What gift cards do not do

Read this list before you promise a customer anything.

• A customer cannot buy one. Covered above. You issue every card by hand.
• The full code is shown once and can never be recovered. Not by you, not by our support team, not from the database. Only the last four digits are kept. See The code is shown once.
• A gift card can never be deleted. There is no delete button and no way to remove one. Disabling is the reversible substitute.
• Nothing expires. There is no expiry field on the issue form and no job that expires cards, so a card you issue today is redeemable indefinitely.
• A card only pays in its own currency. A card issued in shekels cannot pay a dollar order. There is no conversion.
• Nothing prints, and nothing is designed for you. There is no physical card, no PDF voucher, no gift-card artwork and no scheduled "send on their birthday" delivery. You get a code, and one plain email if you entered a recipient address.
• A refund of an order paid by gift card goes back to the card, never to a bank card and never as cash. See Refunding an order that was paid with a gift card.

In this section

1. Issue a gift card turns the feature on and mints your first card, including the one-time code reveal.
2. Manage gift cards covers adjusting a balance, disabling a card, re-issuing a lost code, bulk actions and the CSV export.
3. How a customer redeems a gift card covers the checkout side, part payment, and why a code gets refused.
4. Gift card liability and refunds covers the month-end number, held balances, and what happens when you refund.

What's next?

• Coupons are discount codes, which is a different mechanism. Use one of those to take money off an order.
• Refund an order covers ordinary refunds, and how they change when a gift card paid part of the order.