Issue a gift card

Turn gift cards on for your store, mint a card by hand, copy the code before it disappears, and email it to the customer.

Every gift card in Brainerce is issued by you, by hand. This article walks through it. New to gift cards? Read the gift cards overview first, because a gift card is a means of payment rather than a discount, and that changes how you account for it.

Gift cards are still in rollout. There is no Gift cards entry in your sidebar yet, so you cannot reach this screen from your dashboard today. It appears in the Marketing group when the rollout reaches your store.

Customers cannot buy a gift card, so there is nothing to sell

Before the steps, the thing people look for and do not find. There is no gift-card product and no way for a shopper to purchase one on your website. No product type, no storefront page, no automatic delivery after payment. Issuing by hand from this screen is the only way a card comes into existence.

That makes this screen right for goodwill after a bad delivery, a voucher you sold over the counter, staff credit, a prize, or a refund you would rather give as store credit. It is not yet a gift-card sales channel.

Turn on gift cards for your store

Gift cards start switched off for every store. Until you turn them on, the page tells you so and no card can be issued.

Open Marketing → Gift cards.
If the page reads "Gift cards are switched off for this store", click Turn on gift cards.

They are off by default on purpose. A gift card is money you already took and still owe, which brings accounting treatment and, in some countries, notice duties about expiry and fees. Switching them on is you saying your store is ready to carry that.

Switching them back off does not cancel anything. Existing cards stay readable, redeemable and refundable, because customers are still holding them. Turning the feature off only stops new cards being issued.

Issue a card

Open Marketing → Gift cards and click Issue a card.
Fill in the three fields:

Field	Required	What it does
Amount	Yes	The card's value, in your store's currency. There is no minimum and no maximum.
Reason	Yes	Why you issued it. Stored permanently on the card's history with your name against it.
Recipient	No	An email address. Enter one and Brainerce emails the code to it. Leave it blank and you hand the code over yourself.

Click Issue.

The reason is not a formality. It is the record a finance review reads a year from now, when someone asks why ₪500 left the books on a Tuesday. Write what actually happened, for example "goodwill for order 1042, arrived damaged", not "gift card".

Your store's currency is used, and you cannot change it per card. A card can only ever pay for an order in the currency it was issued in, and Brainerce never converts. If you sell in shekels and dollars, a shekel card cannot pay a dollar order, and the customer sees only a generic refusal at checkout.

There is no expiry field, so the card never expires. Nothing on this form sets an expiry date, and nothing anywhere expires a card later. Whatever you issue today stays redeemable indefinitely, so treat the amount as a permanent liability when you decide how generous to be.

The code is shown once and can never be shown again

The moment the card is created, the code appears on screen with a warning. Copy it then. Click Copy, paste it somewhere safe, and only then close the dialog.

This is not a feature we chose not to build. The code genuinely does not exist anywhere to look up. Brainerce stores a one-way fingerprint of it plus the last four digits, so:

You cannot see it again. Not on the card's page, not in the list, not in the CSV export.
Our support team cannot recover it. There is nothing for us to read.
It is not in the database in a readable form. No engineer can dig it out.

Shopify behaves exactly the same way, for the same reason. A gift-card code is cash: anyone who reads it can spend it, so storing a readable copy would mean any leaked backup is a leaked wallet.

If the code is lost, you are not stuck. Open the card and use Re-issue. It mints a brand new code, moves the whole balance across, and cancels the old one. The customer ends up with a working card and you have lost nothing. See When a customer loses their gift card code.

Emailing the code to the customer

Enter an address in Recipient and Brainerce emails the code there for you, in the customer's language, as soon as the card is issued. That is the safest route, because the code never has to pass through you.

What that email is, and is not:

It is a plain transactional email with the amount and the code in it. There is no gift-card artwork, no PDF to print, and no design to edit.
You cannot schedule it. There is no "deliver on 24 December" option. It sends immediately.
You cannot resend it. The stored copy of the code is wiped the instant the send succeeds, so there is nothing left to send again. Use Re-issue instead, which emails the replacement code to the same address automatically.
Leave Recipient blank and no email is sent at all. Copying the code off the screen is then the only way it reaches anybody.

Good to know

A card is worth what you typed, not what anyone paid. Brainerce does not take payment for the card and does not check that you collected the money. Issuing a ₪500 card creates a ₪500 debt on your books whether or not ₪500 came in.
The amount shows up in your outstanding liability immediately. See Gift card liability.
A gift card is never deleted. Once issued it exists forever, even at zero balance. If you issued one by mistake, adjust the balance down to zero and disable it. See Manage gift cards.

What's next?

Manage gift cards covers adjusting, disabling, re-issuing and exporting.
How a customer redeems a gift card covers what happens on your website.