How to export gift card codes from Shopify

The one-way door

Gift card codes on Shopify are a one-way door. The full code exists in the API response at creation and nowhere else afterwards. Shopify admin shows ••••4821. The Admin API returns lastCharacters: "4821". There is no flag, no permission, and no support escalation that returns the rest.

Most merchants discover this the first time a customer emails saying they deleted the gift card email.

What that means in practice

For single cards created by hand, it is survivable. You created one card, you emailed it, the customer has it.

For batches it is a real operational problem. If you created 400 codes for a print run and never exported them, you now have 400 cards with money on them and no way to know which code goes with which physical card.

What to do about it

Create with something that keeps the codes. Bulk Gift Cards stores every code at the moment it creates the card, then gives you three ways to get at them:

• Search by partial code, customer email, or the note you set on the batch. Search is dash and case tolerant, so 4K2P finds wnwn-4k2p-9911.
• Reveal an individual full code from history when a customer asks you to resend.
• Export the whole batch as CSV: code, amount, currency, email, note.

Do the export the day you create the batch. The cost is thirty seconds and the alternative is unrecoverable.

The reissue procedure, for when it is already too late

1. Find the card by its last four characters in Shopify admin.
2. Note the remaining balance.
3. Disable the card so the old code cannot be spent.
4. Create a replacement card for the remaining balance and send it to the customer.

That works for one customer. It does not scale to a batch, which is the whole argument for exporting up front.