Gift cards guide
How to fulfil a corporate bulk gift card order on Shopify
A company wants 500 gift cards at $50 each. Here is the whole workflow on Shopify, from quote to code delivery, without creating 500 cards by hand.
The order that breaks the manual process
A local employer wants 500 gift cards at $50 for a staff appreciation programme. That is $25,000 of prepaid revenue, which is a good day. It is also 500 trips through Shopify’s create-gift-card form, at maybe 25 seconds each, which is three and a half hours of clicking with no undo.
Worse, at the end of it you have 500 cards whose codes Shopify has already masked, and a client waiting for a list.
The version that takes ten minutes
- Draft order for $25,000, paid.
- Generator form: quantity 500, amount $50, currency USD, notify off, note “Acme Corp PO-4471”.
- Preview, confirm.
- Export CSV.
- Send the file.
The note field is doing quiet work there. When Acme calls in March asking you to check a balance, “Acme Corp PO-4471” is what lets you find the batch in three seconds.
Mixed-value orders
Some corporate orders are tiered: 400 cards at $25 for staff, 80 at $100 for managers, 20 at $500 for the leadership team. That is a CSV, not a generator form:
amount,currency,notify,note
25.00,USD,,Acme PO-4471 staff
25.00,USD,,Acme PO-4471 staff
100.00,USD,,Acme PO-4471 manager
500.00,USD,,Acme PO-4471 leadershipGenerate the repeated rows in a spreadsheet, upload once, and the preview tells you whether your row counts add up to the invoice before you create anything.
When the client wants each recipient emailed
Then you need a recipient list, and the CSV gains two columns:
amount,currency,customer_email,notify,note
50.00,USD,dana@acme.com,true,Acme PO-4471
50.00,USD,sam@acme.com,true,Acme PO-4471Shopify sends its standard gift card notification to each address as the card is created. Warn the client that the email comes from your store, not theirs, and that it will land in a lot of spam folders at a corporate domain. Most clients, once they hear that, choose the CSV.
Pricing this out
On a per-card-fee app, a 500-card order is a line item. Three of the highest-rated gift card apps on the Shopify App Store charge a percentage of gift card value on top of their monthly fee, typically 1 to 2.5 percent. On $25,000 of cards that is $250 to $625 taken out of a single order.
Bulk Gift Cards is a flat $49 a month with no percentage on card value, which is the entire argument for it on orders this size.
Frequently asked questions
Should a corporate gift card order be gift cards or store credit?
Gift cards. Store credit is locked to one customer record and cannot be handed to someone else, which defeats the point of a corporate order where the buyer distributes value to people who are not yet your customers.
How do I charge for a bulk gift card order?
Most stores invoice the face value with no discount, sometimes with a small handling fee for large runs. Some offer a volume discount, for example 500 cards at $50 sold for $23,750. That discount is a real margin decision, since the cards will be redeemed at full value.
How do I account for it?
Gift card sales are a deferred liability, not revenue. You recognise revenue as the cards are redeemed. This is the main accounting difference between gift cards and store credit issued as a refund, and it is worth confirming the treatment with your accountant before your first large corporate order.
Can I put an expiry on corporate cards?
Check your jurisdiction first. Gift card expiry is restricted or prohibited in most of the US and the EU. Even where it is legal, a corporate buyer will usually push back on it.
What if the client wants the cards branded or printed?
Create the cards with notify off, export the codes, and hand the CSV to your print vendor. This is exactly the case where losing the codes is unrecoverable, so export before anything else.
Keep reading
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