Gift Cards page: find, change and track every gift card
Every gift card your site sells, gives away or makes is money a customer holds with you. The Gift Cards page keeps all of them in one place: find any card in seconds, see where every dollar went, and fix a balance or an expiry date with a note your team can read later.
Find it under Discounts & Credits > Gift Cards. Viewing cards needs the Support or Accounting role or higher. Making and changing a card needs the Manager role or higher.
Finding a card
The list opens on active cards. Search by code, by customer name or email, or by the buyer or recipient of a bought card. Filter by Status (Active, Empty, Expired, Off), by Source (Bought, Promotion bonus, Made by an admin), by customer, or turn on Has a balance. Click a code to open the card.
A customer's page in the admin (Customers > Lookup / Manage) has a Gift Cards panel with their cards that hold a balance, newest first, and a link to all of that customer's gift cards. A card that cannot be spent shows the reason next to its balance: (Off) or (Expired).
Making a card
Click New Gift Card to make a card for a customer, or one to share by code. Type a code that meets the minimum length, or leave it empty and the site makes one. See How to create a gift card from the admin.
A card's page
The card's page shows its balance, original value, status (and why a card is off), expiry, customer and source. A bought card or a promotion bonus also shows the purchase: the date, what was paid, the buyer, the recipient, the message, and every email sent for the card.
The History lists everything that happened to the card, newest first: each spend with a link to its order, and each change with who made it and why. While a checkout is paying, the amount shows as Held for an order, then as Hold kept (order placed), or Hold given back if the order did not go through.
Changing a card
A manager can change a card from its page. Each change asks for a reason and goes into the history with your name.
- Change balance: add or remove an amount. The balance cannot go below zero.
- Change expiry: pick a new date, or tick Never expires. The reason is optional here.
- Turn off: the customer cannot spend the card until it is turned on again. The balance stays. Turn on needs a card that has a balance and has not expired, so change those first.
- Change customer: move the card to another account.
Emailing a card again
Staff with the Support role or higher can email an active bought or bonus card again with Email the card to the recipient again or Email the card to the customer. That email shows the card's current balance.
How a card works at checkout
- Customers enter the code in the Gift Card field at checkout, right next to the discount code field.
- A gift card, a discount code and credits can all go on one order.
- A gift card can pay for everything, including tax, fees and tip. If the balance covers it, no card is charged.
- The receipt shows the order total, what the gift card paid, and what was charged.
- A card that is expired, switched off, empty, or tied to someone else is turned down with a clear reason. A card works through its expiry date, so a last-day order goes through.
- Selling a gift card does not add sales tax; tax is charged on the order it is spent on.
Balances and uses
The balance goes down with every use, and the card switches itself off at zero (its status reads Empty). Adding balance to an empty card turns it back on, unless it has expired or an admin turned it off. The total held on active cards, and when that balance expires, is on the Stored Value report. See Stored value: gift card and credit balances, tax, and expiry. Every spend across all your cards is on the All-Time Gift Card Use report. See Your reports: a tour of the Reports page.
Cards customers buy
A card bought on your gift card page shows with the source Bought. The code is emailed to the recipient, any account can redeem it once, and it locks to that account on first use. Who bought it and for how much is also recorded under Discounts & Credits > Voucher Purchases. A card earned in a bonus gift card promotion shows with the source Promotion bonus.
A card on a pending order
If a scheduled order is stuck because its gift card is refused, open the pending order in the admin. The card shows with a remove link; remove it and finalize the order by hand. See Pending orders: what they are and how finalizing works.
Keywords: gift certificate, store credit, prepaid card
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